Library of America Wendell Berry Edition

The second volume of the Library of America’s definitive two-volume selection of the nonfiction writings of our greatest living advocate for sustainable culture.

Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism, and the vital role of rural, sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Now, in celebration of Berry’s extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume selection of his nonfiction writings prepared in close consultation with the author.

In this second volume, forty-four essays from ten works turn to issues of political and social debate–big government, science and religion, and the meaning of citizenship following the tragedy of 9/11. Also included is his Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities, “It All Turns on Affection” (2012). 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.

INCLUDES:

Life is a Miracle

AND SELECTIONS FROM

Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
Another Turn of the Crank
Citizenship Papers
The Way of Ignorance
What Matters?
Imagination in Place
It All Turns on Affection
Our Only World
The Art of Loading Brush


LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The first volume of the Library of America’s definitive two-volume selection of the nonfiction writings of our greatest living advocate for sustainable culture.

Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism, and the vital role of rural, sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Now, in celebration of Berry’s extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume selection of his nonfiction writings prepared in close consultation with the author.

This first volume collects thirty-three essays from nine different books, including his first, The Long-Legged House (1969), What are People For? (1990), with its still provocative essay “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” and the complete text of his now classic The Unsettling of America (1975), whose argument about the enormous ecological, economic, and human costs of industrial agriculture has, as the author notes, “not had the happy fate of being proved wrong.”

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.

INCLUDES:

The Unsettling of America

AND SELECTIONS FROM

The Long-Legged House
The Hidden Wound
A Continuous Harmony
Recollected Essays 
The Gift of Good Land
Standing by Words
Home Economics
What Are People For?


LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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

For more than fifty years, in eight novels and fortytwo 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. Taken together, these novels and stories form a masterwork of American prose: straightforward, spare, and lyrical. 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, 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 and a Port William Membership family tree, and helpful notes.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.