In a moment of literary serendipity last Thursday, one writer in The Library of America series was honored at the home of another when James Baldwin was the subject of a public program at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s former estate in western Massachusetts. Darryl Pinckney, editor of the forthcoming LOA collection James Baldwin: Later Novels, joined journalist and critic Kate Bolick for a talk on contemporary race relations and how Baldwin’s writings continue to resonate in twenty-first-century America. The conversation kicked off the latest season of “Touchstones at the Mount,” an ongoing series of author talks hosted by Bolick.

By coincidence, James Baldwin: Later Novels will be published one week from today–on the same day as Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s, the fifth installment in The Library of America edition of Wharton’s collected works.

In addition to editing the forthcoming Baldwin volume for The Library of America, Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton and the nonfiction works Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature and Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy. Bolick, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, is the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, a combination of memoir and cultural criticism that includes a lengthy consideration of Edith Wharton’s life and work.

Watch this space in the weeks ahead for more on both James Baldwin: Later Novels and Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s.

Photograph courtesy of The Mount.