1. So a few thoughts on the American literary canon, the Library of America, pulp fiction, hard boiled detectives, Ross Macdonald, pirating J.R.R. Tolkien, Hugh Kenner and Samuel R. Delany.
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2. When the Library of America was launched in 1982, the critic Hugh Kenner wrote an interesting critique in Harper’s arguing that the emerging list (Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Beecher Stowe) was a very constricted, very conservative New England canon.
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3. Kenner thought if the Library of America was going to survive it would have to embrace both experimental writing (the tradition of Pound-Williams-Moore plus the Beats) and genre fiction (he named his friend the detective novelist Ross Macdonald).pic.twitter.com/634JRoW1zK
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4. Kenner prediction proved right, although he overestimated how long it would take. He thought Ross Macdonald would make the list within a century – in fact it took 32 years (the first Ross Macdonald volume was 2015).
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5. In retrospect, the real pivot point for Library of America was the 2-volume Raymond Chandler in 1995 – the first purely genre writer they published, which opened the floodgates for Hammet, Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Le Guin & specialized volumes on westerns, horror, s.f. etc
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6. In a lot of ways, Chandler was the perfect gateway for LOA to enter into genre publishing: his prose style is “literary” enough for respectability but he unquestionably wrote hard-boiled detective novels.
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7. This expansion of the canon has happened with remarkably little backlash (very few Hilton-Kramer-esque laments) and has been very popular (the Philip K. Dick volumes are among the LOA’s bestsellers).
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8. The most recent example is the 2 volumes of Science Fiction Novels. I had the honor of writing (at the author's request) the essay accompany one of those volumes, Samuel Delany’s Nova (1968): https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1592-samuel-r-delany-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-super-emnovaem …
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9. One consequence of LOA’s expansion into genre is that it’s highlighted the importance Ace Books, an absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel bottom feeding publisher of garish throwaway paperbacks – many now enshrined as literary classics (Dick, Delany, Le Guin, Joanna Russ).pic.twitter.com/gTtJAzGLgg
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