The library of America is dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.

A collection of essays, first published in 1903, in which the author examines the role, influence, and perceptions of African-American men and women in turn-of-the-century society. Includes a chronology of the author's life, explanatory notes, and critical commentary.

The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare...

A black family is united in love and pride as they struggle to overcome poverty and harsh living conditions, in the 1959 play about an embattled Chicago family.

James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer’s ten-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south at the time of the school integration battles. It contains Baldwin’s controversial and intimate profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman. And it explores such varied themes as the relations between blacks and whites, the role of

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Presents fifteen stories with a wide range of characters and scenes shifting between uptown New York and rural North Carolina.

"The Newbery Award-winning author of The Crossover pens an ode to black American triumph and tribulation, with art from a two-time Caldecott Honoree"-- The illustrations capture many famous black Americans and key moments in their struggle for freedom and equality, including people such as Martin Luther King, Billie Holiday, Wilma Rudolph, Langston Hughes, and Trayvon Martin, and events such as slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement....

Color (1925) is a collection of poems by Countee Cullen. Published the same year Cullen entered Harvard to pursue a masters in English. Color was a brilliant debut by a poet who had already gained a reputation as a leading young artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Deeply personal and attuned to poetic tradition, Cullen's verses capture the spirit of creative inquiry that defined a generation of writers, musicians, painters, and intellectuals while changing...