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.
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.
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). 
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).
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
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.
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).
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): loa.org/news-and-views…
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).
10. Ace’s signature publication was the Ace Double – two books published together with a flipped cover.
11. As editor Terry Carr once joked, “If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.’”
12. Ace was known for its shoddy dealings (they paid $500-$1500 per novel, Dick & other writers had to constantly fight for withheld royalties). Notoriously Ace used a loophole in copyright laws to publish a pirated edition of Lord of the Rings.
13. Hugh Kenner, far-seeing and prophetic, is linked to the Lord of the Rings piracy saga. In the early 1960s, he noted that there was no paperback edition of the trilogy & thought there was a market for it. It was Ace (operating on its own) that took advantage of the gap.
14. As tawdry and criminal as they sometimes were, Ace Books was, to judge by the Library of America, one of the most important American publishers of the 1960s, the publisher that launched Dick, Delany, Le Guin, Russ, Lafferty, Zelazny, and many others who are now canonical.
15. My essay on Delany explores how he himself was emblematic of the blurring line between literary fiction and genre back in the 1960s. That's one reason he and Le Guin are so important. loa.org/news-and-views…
16. The next step, of course, will be to get the LOA to make this dream project -- a Samuel R. Delany set -- real.
