Wendell Berry

Overview: Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land-from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly,...

Acclaimed essayist and poet Wendell Berry was born and has always lived in a "provincial" part of the country. In an effort to adapt his writing to his place of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry discovered an enduringly useful example in the work of William Carlos Williams. In Williams' commitment to his place of Rutherford, New Jersey, Berry found an inspiration that inevitably influenced the direction of his own poetry. Both men would go on to establish...

From the simple setting of his own barber shop, Jayber Crow, orphan, seminarian, and native of Port William, recalls his life and the life of his community as it spends itself in the middle of the twentieth century. Surrounded by his friends and neighbors, he is both participant and witness as the community attempts to transcend its own decline. And meanwhile Jayber learns the art of devotion and that a faithful love is its own reward.

"At the age of eighty, Andy Catlett is preparing himself to join the whole Membership of Port William, which includes those alive as well as those departed who still seem vividly alive. As he looks back on his own life through thirteen stories that range from his earliest childhood memories to the present day, from 1945 to 2001, How It Went reveals Andy at his most loving and retrospective, coming to the end of his days surrounded by the love and...

In a rural Kentucky river town, 'Old Jack' Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the shades of one burnished day in September 1952. Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values Americans strive to recapture as they arrive at the next century.

"In this new collection of [ten] essays, Berry confronts head-on the necessity of clear thinking and direct action. Never one to ignore the present challenge, he understands that only clearly stated questions support the understanding their answers require. For more than fifty years we've had no better spokesman and no more eloquent advocate for the planet, for our families, and for the future of our children and ourselves"--