Back What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969-2017 (boxed set)

What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969-2017 (boxed set)

Edited by Jack Shoemaker

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News Wendell Berry’s Writings Donated to Libraries Throughout Kentucky
August 7, 2024

News “Your Friend, Wendell”: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry
August 5, 2024

Interviews Mary Berry: Extending Wendell Berry’s legacy is “the most hopeful work I can think of”
September 13, 2019

Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a writer whose life’s work has been dedicated to “what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households.” In essays both deeply personal and powerfully polemical, Berry speaks for a culture of stewardship and husbandry, for the welfare of rural people often forgotten and marginalized, and for the vital role of sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Berry’s writing combines the authority and wisdom of experience—he has lived on and farmed a hilly acreage in Henry County, Kentucky, on sustainable principles for more than half a century—with the grace and clarity of a great American prose stylist.

In this two-volume edition, such landmark books as The Unsettling of America and Life Is a Miracle are included in full, along with generous selections from more than a dozen other volumes, revealing as never before the evolution of Berry’s thoughts and concerns as a farmer, neighbor, citizen, teacher, activist, and ecological philosopher. Throughout he demonstrates that our existence is always connected to the land, and that even in a modern global economy local farming is essential to the flourishing of our culture, to healthy living and stable communities, and indeed to the continuing survival of the human species. Berry’s essays remain timely, even urgent today, and will resonate with anyone interested in our relationship to the natural world and especially with a younger, politically engaged generation invested in the future welfare of the planet.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for both volumes was provided by The Gould Family Foundation and Walter E. Robb.

Wendell Berry: Essays 1969–1990 is kept in print by a gift from Walter E. Robb to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.

Wendell Berry: Essays 1993–2017 is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News Wendell Berry’s Writings Donated to Libraries Throughout Kentucky
August 7, 2024

News “Your Friend, Wendell”: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry
August 5, 2024

Interviews Mary Berry: Extending Wendell Berry’s legacy is “the most hopeful work I can think of”
September 13, 2019

News Photos: Wendell Berry and friends celebrate What I Stand On
August 14, 2019

Story of the Week Wendell Berry, “The Rise”
August 5, 2019
Table of Contents

from THE LONG-LEGGED HOUSE (1969)
The Rise
The Long-Legged House
A Native Hill

from THE HIDDEN WOUND (1970)
Chapters 4 through 8

from A CONTINUOUS HARMONY (1972)
Think Little
Discipline and Hope
In Defense of Literacy

from RECOLLECTED ESSAYS (1981)
The Making of a Marginal Farm

THE UNSETTLING OF AMERICA (1977)

from THE GIFT OF GOOD LAND (1981)
Horse- Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving
Solving for Pattern
Family Work
A Few Words for Motherhood
A Talent for Necessity
Seven Amish Farms
The Gift of Good Land

from STANDING BY WORDS (1983)
Standing by Word
Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms

from HOME ECONOMICS (1987)
Getting Along with Nature
Two Economies
The Loss of the University
Preserving Wildness
A Good Farmer of the Old School

from WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR? (1990)
Damage
Wallace Stegner and the Great Community
Writer and Region
An Argument for Diversity
The Pleasures of Eating
The Work of Local Culture
Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer
Feminism, the Body, and the Machine
Word and Flesh
Nature as Measure

from SEX, ECONOMY, FREEDOM & COMMUNITY (1993)
Conservation and Local Economy
Conservation Is Good Work
Christianity and the Survival of Creation
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

from ANOTHER TURN OF THE CRANK (1995)
Farming and the Global Economy
Conserving Forest Communities
Health Is Membership

LIFE IS A MIRACLE: AN ESSAY AGAINST MODERN SUPERSTITION (2000)

from CITIZENSHIP PAPERS (2003)
A Citizen’s Response
Thoughts in the Presence of Fear
The Failure of War
In Distrust of Movements
The Total Economy
Two Minds
The Whole Horse
The Agrarian Standard
Conservationist and Agrarian

from THE WAY OF IGNORANCE (2005)
Secrecy vs. Rights
Contempt for Small Places
Compromise, Hell!
Charlie Fisher
The Way of Ignorance
Quantity vs. Form
Renewing Husbandry
The Burden of the Gospels

from WHAT MATTERS? (2010)
Money Versus Goods
Faustian Economics

from IMAGINATION IN PLACE (2010)
Imagination in Place
American Imagination and the Civil War
Sweetness Preserved
The Uses of Adversity
God, Science, and Imagination

from IT ALL TURNS ON AFFECTION (2012)
It All Turns on Affection
About Civil Disobedience

from OUR ONLY WORLD (2015)
Paragraphs from a Notebook
The Commerce of Violence
A Forest Conversation
Local Economies to Save the Land and the People
Caught in the Middle
Our Deserted Country
On Being Asked for “A Narrative for the Future”

from THE ART OF LOADING BRUSH (2017)
The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age
The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-610-2 1700 pages

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