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 / Stories

Library of America inaugurates its edition of the complete fiction of one of America's most beloved living writers

Port William, Kentucky, is one of the most fully realized settings in American literature. For more than fifty years, in novels and stories that combine a Faulknerian sense of place with the wry characterization of Mark Twain, Wendell Berry has told its history from the Civil War to the present day. This agrarian world is populated with memorable characters collectively known as the Port William Membership, women and men whose stories evoke a time when farming, faith, and family were the anchors of community and the ligaments that bound generation to generation. Now, for the first time, in an edition prepared in consultation with the author, Library of America is presenting the complete story of Port William in the order of narrative chronology. This first volume contains twenty-three stories and four novels that span from 1864 to 1945, as a town that sees itself as rooted in its past faces the forces of mechanization and the looming possibility of its own disappearance. Throughout, the stories that Port William tells of itself, repeated between friends and among fellow workers, turn wit and gossip into proverbial wisdom. All the stories reveal the ways that ordinary men and women strive to achieve right relationship with themselves, with Creator and Creation, through small acts that combine, over time, to foster a sustainable community imbued with hope and wonder.

WENDELL BERRY (b. 1934) is a novelist, poet, farmer, and environmental writer and activist. He earned an MA in English at the University of Kentucky in 1957 and in 1958 joined Stanford University's creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, studying under Stegner and with Edward Abbey, Larry McMurtry, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen, Robert Stone, and Ken Kesey. In 1961 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to spend a year in Tuscany. From 1962-64 he taught English at NYU before returning to the University of Kentucky, where he taught creative writing from 1964 until 1977 and then again from 1987 to 1993. He has published over 50 books, including over 25 books of poetry, 16 essay collections, and 8 novels. In 2010 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, and in 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 he received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He has made his home with his wife, Tanya Berry, in Henry County, Kentucky, for the last 50 years.

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