If Publicity has done its job, then everyone will have heard by now of the Library of America–an ambitious series of books being funded by the Lord Foundation and the National Endowment lor the Humanities. Everyone will have heard of the project's attenuated arrival (it was first proposed by the late Edmund Wilson in the early 1960s); of its plan to furnish the world with the works of the greater and lesser authors of this country, set forth in elegant volumes, and, finally, of the extraordinary collaboration that the project has prompted between forces normally opposed or estranged: The series is to be edited by the academic community. on the one hand, and manufactured and distributed by “the Trade” on the other.