2012
Great-granddaughter Charlcye Anne Johnson born February 7. Receives O. Henry Prize for short story “Nothing Living Lives Alone.” New Collected Poems published in March; Christian Science Monitor hails it as “a welcome complement to the rest of his work.” Receives the Steward of God’s Creation Award at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C, April 22. Delivers the 41st Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on April 23: “We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.” It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays published in September. A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership published in October. On October 17, receives the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award for efforts toward a healthier, safer, and more sustainable food system, in New York City. On October 30, receives the inaugural Green Cross Award, given by the Bishop of California, for increasing cultural engagement in environmental issues.
2013
In April, elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Berry Center and St. Catharine College in Springfield, Kentucky, establish The Berry Farming Program, an undergraduate, multidisciplinary degree inspired by Wes Jackson and Berry’s philosophy and work, and designed for students from generational farm families. The program accepts its first students in the fall (St. Catharine College will close in 2016, and the following year the Berry Farming Program moves to partnership with Sterling College in Vermont). This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected & New 1979–2013 published in October. On October 17, awarded the Freedom Medal from the Roosevelt Institute’s Four Freedoms Awards in New York City. Daughter Mary marries Steve Smith, October 26.
2014
Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, edited by Chad Wriglesworth, published in June with reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal, and other publications. Terrapin and Other Poems, with illustrations by Tom Pohrt, published in November. Poetry collection Roots to the Earth, with woodcuts by Wesley Bates, published by Larkspur Press.
2015
On January 28, inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, the first living writer to be so honored. Our Only World: Ten Essays published in February. Poetry collection Sabbaths 2013 published by Larkspur Press.
2016
Receives O. Henry Prize for short story “Dismemberment.” On March 17, receives the Ivan Sandof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in New York City, presented by Nick Offerman. A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with “The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation” published in June. On September 25, delivers the Strachan Donnelley Lecture on Conservation and Restoration at the 2016 Prairie Festival in Salina, Kansas, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of The Land Institute and the tenure and retirement of Wes Jackson as president. Brother John M. Berry Jr. dies, October 27. Speaks in conversation with Wes Jackson, and moderated by Mary Berry, at the 36th Annual Schumacher Lectures, October 22. Great-granddaughter Wendy Jean Johnson born, October 29. In December, speaks with Eric Schlosser at the twentieth anniversary of the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.
2017
The World Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, selected by Paul Kingsnorth, published by Allen Lane in the United Kingdom in January. Contributes to Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future by Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, published by Princeton Architectural Press. The Art of Loading Brush published by Counterpoint in October.
Note on the Texts
This volume contains four novels—Nathan Coulter (1960, 1985), Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006), A World Lost (1996), and A Place on Earth (1967, 1983)—and twenty-three stories by Wendell Berry set in and around the fictional farming community of Port William, Kentucky, arranged in order of their narrative chronology, beginning during the Civil War and ending with World War II.
After publishing his first three novels (including two in this volume) with Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt Brace, Berry began working in 1980 with Jack Shoemaker, the editor who had cofounded North Point Press in Berkeley, California, in 1979 with William Turnbull. Beginning with the revised 1983 edition of A Place on Earth, all of Berry’s novels and story collections were edited by Shoemaker, and Berry followed him first to Pantheon when North Point closed in 1991; then to Counterpoint Press, which Shoemaker cofounded with Frank H. Pearl in Washington, D.C., in 1994; then to Shoemaker & Hoard in 2002, which Shoemaker cofounded with Trish Hoard, and in which Berry became an investor; and finally back to Counterpoint, which merged with Shoemaker & Hoard when Shoemaker and Charlie Winton purchased both Counterpoint Press and Soft Skull Press in 2007. Counterpoint Press now publishes all of Berry’s novels and story collections. None of Berry’s fiction has been published in British editions.
As Berry’s earlier work was reissued, he made revisions in the novels and stories, often to bring details of names, relationships, and geography into agreement with the rest of the Port William works; Berry said he wanted to be sure “the outhouse was always on the same side of the river.” In 2004, for the publication of his collection That Distant Land, Shoemaker & Hoard hired Berry’s daughter Mary Berry, who made notes of characters, relationships, and geography, from which the family tree and the map of Port William, printed as endpapers in the present volume, were created. Editions published after 2004 were brought into agreement with the family tree and the map. This edition uses as its source the latest Counterpoint Press texts, which incorporate corrections made throughout previous editions. Further information about the composition and publication history of each novel follows, in the order of their appearance in the present volume.
Berry worked on his first novel, Nathan Coulter, while at the Stanford Creative Writing program on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. It was published in March 1960 by Houghton Mifflin in Boston. In 1985 it was significantly revised for publication by North Point. Many of the small changes in the revised edition were made to match details of the town and characters in Berry’s later work; for example, in the first edition of the novel, Port William is never named, and the character Kate Helen Branch is known as Kate Helen Sutter. The most significant change was to cut the last twenty-two pages of the novel, which by 1985 were no longer in line with Berry’s thinking about Nathan’s later life. In the deleted pages, Nathan sleeps with his neighbor Gander Loyd’s young wife Mandy on the night his grandfather dies. After Mandy confesses, Gander tries to kill Nathan at his grandfather’s wake, and Nathan leaves home. The revised Nathan Coulter was later included in Three Short Novels (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), along with Remembering and A World Lost.
Berry originally intended Andy Catlett: Early Travels to be a short story. The first page of his longhand draft is dated February 3, 2005. It was published in 2006 by Shoemaker & Hoard. The present volume incorporates a correction made by the author: on page 450, “The old rails, some of which had probably been split from chestnut trees before the blight, had been ricked up beside the woods to be out of the way and for use mostly as fuel” has been changed to “The old rails had been ricked up beside the woods to be out of the way and for use mostly as fuel.”
The manuscript of the first draft of A World Lost is dated 1993; Berry inscribed his own copy of the first edition with the dates of his various drafts, giving June 9, 1993, for the date on which he began the first draft. He evidently laid the draft aside after completing it, and did not begin work on the second draft until January 30, 1995. He finished the second draft on April 3, 1995, and it was published in 1996 by Counterpoint.
Berry beg
an writing A Place on Earth in early 1960 and worked on it during his travels to Italy and southern France on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961–62, and then in New York City in 1962–64, when he taught at University College of New York University; and finally in Kentucky, after he returned there in 1965. It was published by Harcourt, Brace in New York in 1967. Berry made significant cuts for its publication by North Point in 1983, shortening the book by about one-third; in his introduction to the 1983 edition, he called the original book “clumsy, overwritten, wasteful.” The cuts eliminated scenes and story lines, as well as exposition and explication of meanings, often deleting transitions that provided explication of a scene and creating a more spare style, frequently with minor revisions in phrasing. For example, where the first edition used multiple descriptive images or adjectives, the revised edition often eliminates all but one; in chapter 1, for instance, “The ear-flaps of his corduroy cap have come untied; they flail out at warped angles from the sides of his head, dangling their strings, like the wings of some disgruntled bird, or wings attached to the helmet of an old Viking” was revised in the 1983 edition so that the sentence ends with “disgruntled bird.” The revised edition cuts passages explaining the background of various characters, including Whacker Spradlin, Gideon Crop, Burley Coulter, and Ernest Finley, and eliminates a chapter giving the history of Mat Feltner’s boyhood, courtship, education, and marriage. The first edition contained many journal entries in which Mat Feltner worked out his feelings about his son Virgil’s disappearance in the war. These were all cut from the revised edition. Berry also added titles to each section, renumbered the chapters, and spelled out all contractions. A later edition, identical to the revised 1983 edition, was issued by Counterpoint in 2001.
Berry collected all of his short stories in two volumes: That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004) and A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012). Those two volumes are the sources of the texts used here. The original publication information for each of the stories follows (in the order of their appearance in the present volume):
“The Girl in the Window,” The Threepenny Review 120 (Winter 2010), pp. 14–17. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 3–13.
“The Hurt Man,” The Hudson Review 56.3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 431–38. Collected in That Distant Land, pp. 3–11.
“Fly Away, Breath,” The Threepenny Review 113 (Spring 2008), pp. 28–29. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 14–20.
“A Consent,” The Draft Horse Journal (Autumn 1990), pp. 132ff. In 1993 it was published as a limited edition chapbook of 1,000 copies by Larkspur Press, Monterey, Kentucky. Collected in Watch With Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch (New York: Pantheon, 1994), and later in That Distant Land, pp. 25–37.
“Pray Without Ceasing,” The Southern Review 28.4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 679–714. Collected in Fidelity: Five Stories (Pantheon, 1992), and then in That Distant Land, pp. 38–76.
“Watch With Me” was first published in Watch With Me. Later collected in That Distant Land, pp. 77–123.
“A Half-Pint of Old Darling,” The Draft Horse Journal 30.2 (Summer 1993), pp. 182ff. Collected in Watch With Me, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 124–136.
“The Lost Bet” was originally published as a chapbook, How Ptolemy Proudfoot Lost a Bet, by Dim Gray Bar Press in 1992 in a limited and numbered run of 100 copies. Collected in That Distant Land, pp. 137–144.
“Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows,” Oxford American 77 (Summer 2012), pp. 44–47. It also appeared in The Draft Horse Journal (Winter 2013), pp. 108ff. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 21–26.
“Thicker than Liquor” was first published in The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership (San Francisco: North Point, 1986), and then in That Distant Land, pp. 145–163.
“Nearly to the Fair,” The Draft Horse Journal 30.3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 149–57. Collected in Watch With Me, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 164–180.
“Burley’s Coulter’s Fortunate Fall,” The Sewanee Review 116.2 (Spring 2008), pp. 264–73. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 27–36.
“The Solemn Boy,” The Draft Horse Journal (Summer 1994), pp. 184ff. Collected in Watch With Me, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 181–195.
“A Jonquil for Mary Penn,” The Atlantic Monthly (February 1992), pp. 73–79. Collected in Fidelity, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 196–209.
“Turn Back the Bed,” The Draft Horse Journal (Winter 1989–90), pp. 130–37. Collected in Watch With Me, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 210–220.
“A Burden,” Oxford American 66 (Fall 2009), pp. 66–70. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 37–47.
“A Desirable Woman,” Hudson Review 61.2 (Summer 2008), pp. 295–314. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 48–68.
“Misery,” Shenandoah 58.3 (Winter 2008), pp. 111ff. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 69–80.
“Andy Catlett: Early Education,” The Threepenny Review 117 (Spring 2009), pp. 6–7. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 81–87.
“Drouth,” The Threepenny Review 128 (Winter 2012), pp. 8–11. It also appeared in Farming. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 88–97.
“Stand By Me,” The Atlantic Fiction 2008 Issue (August 2008), pp. 18–23. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 98–112.
“Making It Home,” The Sewanee Review 100.1 (Winter 1992), pp. 1–17, under the title “A Homecoming.” Collected in Fidelity, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 221–236.
“Not a Tear,” The Threepenny Review 128 (Winter 2012), p. 30. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 113–115.
This volume presents the texts of the original printings chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce features of their typographic design. The texts are presented without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features, and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 91.40, firstcomers; 131.1, Women’s; 148.10, go; 224.17, stubborness; 269.22, shirt tail; 354.35 (and passim), O. R.; 360.20, uncle; 367.39, uncle; 369.29, Gibralter; 372.24, passive or; 374.19, their; 381.37, Milby’s; 385.5, for in; 386.17, Russet’s; 397.22, uncle; 403.28, Women’s; 403.31, uncle; 404.5, athiesm; 419.6, uncle; 422.34, uncle; 437.3, uncle; 445.27, uncle; 458.1, Standardbred; 475.20, was then; 491.34, Boys ’; 512.27, uncle; 543.30, grownup; 550.15, uncle; 551.4, uncle; 561.1 (and passim), R. T.; 608.2, uncle; 608.7, uncle; 671.34, ”the far; 677.8, nearly; 685.9, ”We’ll; 687.28, work Burley; 703.2, of house; 731.5, be goes; 752.19, We are; 754.12, be had; 778.5, ”Mat; 780.22, out it; 783.14, “‘Whoa! Jarrat; 810.19, steam; 821.29, asks,; 863.17, goodbye; 865.28, says,; 874.10, Nettie,; 889.36, ‘cause; 894.11, world!’ She; 902.1, day, before; 956.9, be would.
Notes
In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of the hardcover edition (the line count includes headings). No note is made for material included in standard desk-reference books. Quotations from Shakespeare are keyed to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Biblical quotations are keyed to the King James Version. For references to other studies and further information than is included in the Chronology, see Wendell Berry: Life and Work, ed. Jason Peters (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007); and Conversations with Wendell Berry, ed. Morris Allen Grubbs (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
8.37 the so-called Home Guard] Union-sympathizing militia units from Kentucky; they participated in many skirmishes during the Civil War as well as a few battles.
26.24 Hargrave] Corresponds more or less to Carrollton, Kentucky, originally called Port William. Carrollton is at the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers, about ten miles from Berry’s Port Royal, Kentucky.
38.7–9 B
reathes there the man . . . my native land”?] From “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805).
38.12–13 “Thanatopsis”] Poem (1817) by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878).
38.14 “A Psalm of Life,”] Poem (1838) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882).
38.15 “The Fool’s Prayer,”] Poem (1879) by American poet Edward Rowland Sill (1841–1887).
38.15 “To a Waterfowl,”] Poem (1818) by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878).
38.15–16 “To Daffodils,”] Poem (1648) by English lyric poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674).
38.16 “Concord Hymn,”] Poem (1837) celebrating the Battle of Concord during the Revolutionary War by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), originally titled “Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836” and containing the line “the shot heard round the world.”
38.16 “The Choir Invisible,”] “O May I Join the Choir Invisible,” poem (1867) by English novelist George Eliot (1819–1880).
38.16–17 “Wolsey’s Farewell to His Greatness,”] Henry VIII, III.ii.418–440.
38.17 Hamlet’s Soliloquy] Hamlet, III.i.55–89.
38.17–18 “The Epitaph” from Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,”] Concluding three stanzas from the 1751 poem by English poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771).
38.20–21 loved to the depth . . . her soul could reach.] “How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43),” poem (1850) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861).
38.23 the master of his fate and the captain of his soul.] From “Invictus” (1875) by English poet and critic William Ernest Henley (1849–1903).
38.24 be given liberty or death.] From a March 23, 1775, speech calling for putting the American colonies in a state of defense, made by Patrick Henry (1736–1799) to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 112