Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published more than 300 volumes by authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, Frederick Douglass to Ursula K. Le Guin, including selected writing of several U.S. presidents.

Library of America volumes seek to print authoritative versions of works; include extensive notes, chronologies, and other back matter; and are known for their distinctive physical appearance and characteristics.

[6][7][8] The founding of the Library of America took place in 1979,[9][10] with the creation of an entity known as Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.[11] (This remains the entity under which LOA notes, chronologies, and other auxiliary materials are copyrighted;[12] and, officially, employees work for Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.[6]) Publishers associated in some way with the creation include Lawrence Hughes, Helen Honig Meyer, and Roger W. Straus Jr.[13] The initial board of advisers included Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, R. W. B. Lewis, Robert Coles, Irving Howe, and Eudora Welty.

[20] Public response was in terms of sales positive from the beginning;[7] by 1986, the non-profit was breaking even, although it accepted special grants for specific projects, such as one from the Bradley Foundation to enable the two-volume The Debate on the Constitution set.

The Library of America introduced coverage of American journalism with the 1995 two-volume set Reporting World War II, which not only garnered positive reviews,[23] but soon became one of the publisher's five best-selling offerings to that point, the others being volumes about Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Walt Whitman.

[25] The publisher aims to keep classics and notable historical and genre works in print permanently to preserve America's literary and cultural heritage.

"[15] Although the LOA sells more than a quarter-million volumes annually,[27] with the original seed money having run out,[15] the publisher depends on individual contributions to help meet the costs of preparing, marketing, manufacturing, and maintaining its books.

[5] For instance, under the guidance of Bercovitch, the LOA text of Richard Wright's Native Son restored a number of passages that had been previously cut to make the work more palatable to the Book-of-the-Month Club.

[34] The notes and chronologies are often put together by LOA staff members and in some cases have informed the perspective of the guest editors working on the volume in question.

These collections have long been a trusty resource for historians, writers, and anyone else interested in a variety of historical and literary eras, especially the American founding and early republic."

[22] Writing for the New York Times Book Review, the essayist and teacher William Deresiewicz has referred to the Library of America as "our quasi-official national canon".

[20] The Library of America has attracted a number of criticisms as well, including accusations of selection biases in favor of literary and political trends[41] and the questionable inclusion of certain writers ostensibly non-canonical.

[7] The LOA has been satirized by the essayist Arthur Krystal as "confer[ing] value on writers by encasing their work in handsome black-jacketed covers with a stripe of red, white, and blue on the spine.

[44]In an April Fools' Day swipe at the Library of America's selection standards, another satirical piece proclaimed that the LOA "would publish volumes of Paris Hilton's and William Shatner's memoirs, and possibly those of Jersey Shore's Snooki."

Its obligation hereafter is to husband its resources so that this work remains in print and accessible to readers, and to ensure that funds are on hand for the publication of twentieth-century writers as rights permit.

"[7] Less reservedly, the editor and commentator Norman Podhoretz, writing for Commentary in 1992, said that "the Library of America is as close to the kind of thing [Wilson] envisaged as it could conceivably be.

[6] The LOA uses paper that meets guidelines for permanence originally set out by a committee of the Council on Library Resources[6] and subsequently by the American National Standards Institute.

[47] Each volume is printed on thin but opaque acid-free paper,[11] allowing books ranging from 700 to 1,600 pages to remain fairly compact[5] (although not as small as those in La Pléiade).