missing from LOA

I was just looking over the full LIBRARY OF AMERICA CATALOG now, and trying to figure out what if anything is missing.

The first thing you notice is that Nobel Prize winners who still sell are not yet included (no Hemingway, no Toni Morrison) and I would guess that’s for purely business reasons. If you are Toni Morrison’s publisher or Hemingway’s heirs, it might not be financially wise to agree to a volume in this series. That’s just speculation, but it’s the best reason I can think of.

There’s also the tendency not to include living authors very often. And along with Toni Morrison, I’m sure Pynchon will eventually have a volume or two, and the same for Cormac McCarthy.

But here are the two points that really struck me:

1. No Clement Greenberg so far. If Edmund Wilson can have two volumes, then Greenberg probably deserves at least one (though Wilson deserves special points for suggesting the very idea of the Library of America; he had the French Pléiade series in mind— but Wilson would be appalled at the inclusion of Lovecraft, Chandler, Hammett, and Dick if he were alive to see it). Greenberg was the godfather of the transplantation of avant garde visual art from Europe to New York, and he also writes very well.

2. There are no philosophers in the collection other than William James. Granted, it’s supposed to be a literary collection, and James writes well in a way that Dewey, Peirce, and Royce do not. But what about Santayana?

Yes, I know it can be questioned whether Santayana was “really” American. But the Library of America already contains Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish-Greek who died in Japan and was only in America in the middle years. And they even include Alexis de Tocqueville translated from the French (though that would be pretty hard to avoid in any national literary collection). Thomas Paine is in the collection too, and he’s a flat-out Englishman who wasn’t even in North America until 1774, pushing age 40.

So, here are my two votes for inclusion: Clement Greenberg and George Santayana.

Hemingway is by far the most obtrusive omission at this point, but that really must be just for legal/financial reasons.