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Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Civil War to World War II)

Nathan Coulter | Andy Catlett: Early Travels | A World Lost | A Place on Earth | 23 stories More

Edited by Jack Shoemaker

“Wendell Berry gives us an intimate portrayal of the mind and heart of rural America. His graceful prose is truthful and eloquent. His tone is reliable and steady, like a good rain, sober and serious—all this and at times he is so funny you have to stop and roll on the floor.”—Bobbie Ann Mason

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News “What do I mean by authoritative text?”: Library of America Editor Stefanie Peters on the Making of a Definitive Edition
December 10, 2024

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

For more than fifty years, in eight novels and forty-two short stories, Wendell Berry (b. 1934) has created an indelible portrait of rural America through the lens of Port William, Kentucky, one of the most fully imagined places in American literature. The river town and its environs are home to generations of Coulters, Catletts, Feltners, and other families collectively known as the Membership, women and men whose stories evoke the earthbound pleasures and spiritual richness of what Berry has called the three-dimensional life, a time before industrial agriculture, pervasive technology, and unrestrained consumerism began to unravel the deep bonds of community that once sustained small-town America.

Taken together, these novels and stories form a masterwork of American prose: straightforward, spare, and lyrical. Now, in an edition prepared in consultation with the author, Library of America presents the complete Port William novels and stories for the first time in the order of their narrative chronology, revealing as never before the intricate dovetails and beguiling elegance of Berry’s larger construction. As one of his narrators puts it: “their stories are all added finally into one story . . . bound together in a many-stranded braid beyond the power of any awl to pick apart.”

This first volume, which spans from the Civil War to World War II, gathers the novels Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 1985), A Place on Earth (1967, revised 1983), A World Lost (1996), and Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006), along with twenty-three short stories, among them such favorites as “Watch With Me,” “Thicker than Liquor,” and “A Desirable Woman.” It also features a newly researched chronology of Berry’s life and career, a map of Port William and a Membership family tree, and helpful notes.

Jack Shoemaker, editor, is Editorial Director of Counterpoint Press, publishing the work of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan Connell, Robert Aitken, Anne Lamott, Jane Vandenburgh, and many others. He has worked with Berry for more than forty years.

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.

Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Civil War to World War II) is published with support of the Gould Family Foundation and kept in print in memory of Owsley Brown, II (1942-2011) with a gift from his family to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News “What do I mean by authoritative text?”: Library of America Editor Stefanie Peters on the Making of a Definitive Edition
December 10, 2024

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

News Forthcoming: Spring 2024
July 5, 2023

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

The Girl in the Window (1864)
The Hurt Man (1888)
Fly Away, Breath (1907)
A Consent (1908)
Pray Without Ceasing (1912)
Watch With Me (1916)
A Half-Pint of Old Darling (1920)
The Lost Bet (1929)
Nathan Coulter (1929–1941)
Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows (1930)
Thicker than Liquor (1930)
Nearly to the Fair (1932)
Burley Coulter’s Fortunate Fall (1934)
The Solemn Boy (1934)
A Jonquil for Mary Penn (1940)
Turn Back the Bed (1941)
A Burden (1882, 1907, 1941)
A Desirable Woman (1938–1941)
Misery (1943)
Andy Catlett: Early Education (1943)
Andy Catlett: Early Travels (1943)
Drouth (1944)
Stand By Me (1921–1944)
A World Lost (1944)
A Place on Earth (1945)
Making It Home (1945)
Not a Tear (1945)

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-554-9 1034 pages

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N° 302 Library of America Series

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