On the gloomy days, when the American catastrophes are too much to bear, I turn to my bookcases for solace and even something like friendship, and the shelves throw a welcoming arm over me. The bookcases are organized on the principle of no principle, and nowhere among them is there a section dedicated strictly to the traumas and treasures of life in our unhappy country. Still, scattered here and about are a number of squat volumes in sumptuous black dust jackets, all of the same height, devoted to flights of the American imagination — a sufficient number of those books, such that, if I ever gathered them together, a proper bookcase devoted to them alone would stand before me. These are volumes in the publishing series called the Library of America, which brings out the classics of American literature, Emerson and Mark Twain and little-known names like William Bartram, the ornithologist, and onward to Saul Bellow and beyond, perhaps too much beyond, in a uniform edition. One of those volumes plops into my hand. The cover is maybe a little too sumptuous. A glossy ribbon of red, white, and blue traverses the middle, as if it were a military sash on a colonel’s dress uniform. The publisher’s logo at the bottom of the spine is the Stars and Stripes, configured to suggest an open book. When I open the actual book, still more stars and more stripes blink upwards from the endpapers and the flyleaves. It is the Fourth of July. A tiny bugle says hello every time a page turns. Patriotism at the Library of America does not suffer from timidity. But I do like the feel of those books on my fingers, their heft, the cloth binding, the texture of the paper, and the buttery black dust jackets. It was Edmund Wilson who proposed the idea for those books, and his way of doing so figures in the lore of the series. He came up with the idea during the Second World War, which was perhaps not an ideal moment for founding a new literary institution. Nor was he in command of major finances, or any finances at all, though significant financing was going to be needed. Still, he talked up his idea, and he persisted in doing so into the 1950s. And only in the 1960s, at a vexing moment in his life, did signs of progress come his way. He was in trouble for non-payment of taxes. The IRS was threatening to jail him. And Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who was a White House assistant to President John F. Kennedy, put in a word on his behalf. Kennedy turned out to be an Edmund Wilson admirer. This was not an obvious thing to be, from a White House standpoint. Wilson had lately published a book about the Civil War in which he described Lincoln as a tyrant and the United States as a sea slug. And just then, in 1963, he published a pamphlet, The Cold War and the Income Tax, in which he explained that, given how abhorrent was America’s foreign policy, he was right not to have paid his income tax. But Kennedy was a lucid thinker. Apart from encouraging the tax authorities to show mercy, he decided to award Wilson a Medal of Freedom. The IRS objected. The president responded: “This is not an award for good conduct but for literary merit.” In one of the sections of The Cold War and the Income Tax, Wilson sketched his concept for a publishing series of the American classics. And Kennedy wrote a letter endorsing the idea. Wilson had competitors and enemies beyond the IRS, though. These included the academic literary scholars and their professional organization, the Modern Language Association, or MLA. The scholars and the MLA were promoting their own editions of American literary classics at the university presses. The MLA and the universities commanded a degree of political influence, and they stymied Wilson’s project at every turn, even if he did have a letter from the president. Wilson needed to enlist the support of major foundations, and 217 the MLA made sure to get in his way. Finally he wrote up his frustrations in an essay called “The Fruits of the MLA,” which ran in two parts in the New York Review of Books. By then it was 1968, a year of insurrectionary riots, and Wilson, nothing loath, went about staging his own riot in the pages of the essay. He explained that some of the supreme classics of the American literary past had fallen out of print, which was a disgrace. He explained that still other classics had remained in print, but only in editions published by the university presses in conformity with the MLA’s very exacting scholarly principles. Wilson was endowed with a regal self-confidence, and he had come to feel that, if anyone could speak on behalf of America’s literature across the centuries, he was that person. And, on behalf of American literature, he had no patience for the MLA and its scholarly principles. He observed that, under the MLA’s supervision, teams of academic scholars had gotten hold of various writings by William Dean Howells, or Melville, or Mark Twain, and had pickled them in footnotes and pointless annotations, which rendered the books unreadable. The labor that had gone into amassing those scholarly annotations was, in Wilson’s word, a “boondoggle.” The book prices of the unreadable university editions, thanks to the boondoggle, rendered the books unaffordable, except to institutions. And then, having paused (as his readers may imagine) to pour himself another martini, he threw in a few remarks on the nature of academic life more generally in America. He noted a preposterous quality: “the absurdity of our oppressive PhD system of which we would have been well rid if, at the time of the First World War, when we were renaming our hamburgers Salisbury Steak and our sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage, we had decided to scrap it as a German
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