Preserving American Literature for the Next 250 Years

In 1958, writer and critic Edmund Wilson had the idea to publish a series of books to preserve the most important works of American literature, an idea that in 1982 would become Library of America. In the late ‘50s, the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Henry James, and William Faulkner were either completely or almost completely out of print and unavailable to readers—and the sense that there was distinctly “American” literature was unknown.

Now, over 40 years later, Library of America has published 400 volumes and is seen as a primary judge of the canon of great American writing. But in the age of the Internet and social media, when reading is declining at precipitous rates, why would publishing books to preserve the canon be important at all? Stefanie Peters explores why preserving American classics still matters.