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Wendell Berry: Essays 1969–1990

The Unsettling of America | “Think Little” | “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer” | Thirty-three essays in all More

Edited by Jack Shoemaker

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Table of Contents

Overview

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
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Save $15 when you buy both volumes of the Wendell Berry essays edition in a deluxe boxed set.

In celebration of Berry’s extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume edition of his essays, selected by the author and his longtime editor, Jack Shoemaker, which reveals as never before the evolution of Berry’s thoughts and concerns as a farmer, neighbor, citizen, teacher, activist, and ecological philosopher. This first volume includes the whole of Berry’s now classic book The Unsettling of America (1977) and thirty-two essays from eight collections published from 1969 to 1990: The Long-Legged House (1969), The Hidden Wound (1970), A Continuous Harmony (1972), Recollected Essays: 1969–1980 (1981), The Gift of Good Land (1981), Standing by Words (1983), Home Economics (1987), and What Are People For? (1990).

In The Unsettling of America, Berry explores how and why, even in our modern global economy, locally adapted farming is essential to the flourishing of culture, to healthy living and stable communities, and ultimately to our survival as a species. In his 1995 Afterword to the Third Edition, included here, Berry notes with mounting urgency that his argument about the long-term ecological and human costs of industrial agriculture has “not had the happy fate of being proved wrong.”

Other essays in this volume include his early autobiographical pieces “The Long-Legged House” and “A Native Hill,” the indispensable “Think Little,” “Writer and Region,” “Preserving Wildness,” “The Work of Local Culture,” and the still provocative “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” in which he posits his standards for embracing a new technology, including: “It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.”

Jack Shoemaker, editor, is Editorial Director of Counterpoint Press, publishing the works of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Salter, among 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.

Project support for this volume 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.
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

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-606-5 841 pages

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N° 316 Library of America Series

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