Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories: The Postwar Years (Loa #381)

Library of America continues its definitive edition of Wendell Berry’s complete fiction, including the novels The Memory of Old Jack and Remembering and 23 brilliant and beautiful stories

In this second volume, Port William faces the disappearance of farms and farmers in the decades after World War II, while Andy Catlett resolves to remain in the Membership

Set along the banks of the Kentucky River in America’s heartland, fictional Port William, Kentucky, is an agrarian world is peopled with memorable and beloved characters collectively known as the Port William Membership. For more than 50 years, Wendell Berry has told Port William’s history from the Civil War to the present day, recapturing a time when farming, faith, and family were the anchors of community and the ligaments that bound one generation to the next.

Now Library of America continues its definitive edition, prepared in close consultation with the author and published for his 90th birthday, presenting the complete story of Port William for the first time in the order of narrative chronology.

This second volume contains 23 stories and 2 novels that span the years 1945 to 1978, as the town faces the forces of mechanization and the looming possibility of its own disappearance. As the generation that came of age after the Civil War disappears, the younger generation increasingly chooses to leave and not return; one of the only exceptions is Andy Catlett, who resolves to remain in and to maintain the Membership.

This definitive edition of Wendell Berry’s complete fiction includes detailed notes, endpapers featuring a map of Port William and a Membership family tree, and a chronology of Berry’s remarkable life and career.

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 was the recipient of 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 former 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.