—The Editors of The Atlantic Monthly, 2006

This fall, The Atlantic Monthly celebrates its 150th year of continuous publication. To commemorate this remarkable milestone, Doubleday is publishing THE AMERICAN IDEA: The Best of The Atlantic Monthly; 150 Years of Writers and Thinkers Who Shaped Our History, edited by Robert Vare (Doubleday; October 16, 2007).

This extraordinary anthology brings together seventy-eight of the magazine's most acclaimed and influential articles, including "Letter from Birmingham Jail," by Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the 20th century's most famous reflections upon—and calls for—racial equality; "Broken Windows," by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, which gave birth to a new way of thinking about law enforcement; "The Roots of Muslim Rage," by Bernard Lewis, which prophetically warned of the dangers posed to the West by rising Islamic extremism; and "The Fifty-First State," by James Fallows, which previewed in astonishing detail the mess in which America would find itself in Iraq—a full six months before the invasion.

Organized thematically and enriched by comprehensive introductory head notes for each selection, the anthology showcases the gripping narratives that made Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and William Langewiesche's American Ground 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 role of literature in defining 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 the development, 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.

Rarely has an anthology so vividly captured America. Serious and comic, touching and tough, THE AMERICAN IDEA paints a revealing portrait of who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going.