This fall in commemoration of the Atlantic Monthly’s 150th year of continuous publication, Doubleday published the anthology. The extraordinary collection – which was compiled, edited and introduced by Mr Vare, a Litchfield resident and Atlantic Monthly’s Editor-at-Large — brings together 78 of the magazine’s most acclaimed and influential articles, essays, humor pieces, stories and poems by many of the literary, intellectual and political giants who have defined our national life.

Organized thematically and enriched by comprehensive introductory head notes for each selection, the anthology features such renowned essays as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking,” and Bernard Lewis’s “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” as well as the gripping narratives that made Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of the New Machine, and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation touchstones of American nonfiction.

The collection also highlights some of the Atlantic’s finest moments in fiction and poetry – from the likes of Twain, Whitman, Frost, Hemingway, Nabokov and Bellow – affirming the central roles of literature in illuminating and challenging American society.  

In The Atlantic’s very first issue, in 1857, the magazine’s founders – an illustrious group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell – declared that they would dedicate their new publication to monitoring, exploring, and advancing the cause of what they called ‘the American idea.”  And for the last century and a half, the magazine has been preoccupied with the fundamental subjects of the American experience: war and peace, science and religion, the conundrum of race, the role of women, the plight of the cities, the struggle to preserve the environment, the strengths and failings of our politics, and especially America’s proper place in the world.  

Mr Vare joined he staff of The Atlantic Monthly in 2000. He is a former editor at The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The New York Times Magazine, where he edited the Pulitzer Prize-winning cover story “Grady’s Gift” in 1991.

In 2004, he was the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, a posthumously published collection of writings by Michael Kelly, the former Atlantic editor-in-chief who was killed while covering the war in Iraq. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Mr Vare has taught nonfiction writing at Yale and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Copies of the book will be available at the event for purchase and signing. The program is free of charge.

Call the library at 860-868-7586 or send e-mail to GunnLib@biblio.org to register for the program and for further information. The Gunn Memorial Library is at the juncture of Wykeham Road and Route 47 in Washington.