Wendell Berry

"Jayber Crow, born in Goforth, Kentucky, orphaned at age ten, began his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College." "Eventually, after the flood of 1937, Jayber becomes the barber of the small community of Port William, Kentucky. From behind that barber chair he lives out the questions that drove him from seminary and begins to accept the gifts of community that enclose his answers. The chair gives him a perfect perch from which...

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry gathers one hundred poems written between 1957 and 1996. Chosen by the author, these pieces have been selected from each of nine previously published collections. The rich work in this volume reflects the development of Berry’s poetic sensibility over four decades. Focusing on themes that have occupied his work for years—land and nature, family and community, tradition as the groundwork for life...

A collection of twenty short stories about Port William, a mythical town on the banks of the Kentucky River, populated over the years by a cast of unforgettable characters living in a single place over a long time.

This novel tells the story of one year in the life of young Nathan Coulter, who is growing up on a farm in the fictional community of Port William, Kentucky.

Here, Wendell Berry revisits for the first time his immensely popular Collected Poems, which The New York Times Book Review described as “a straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament, and family life” and “[returns] American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.”

In New Collected Poems, Berry reprints the nearly two hundred pieces in Collected...

Long before organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Wendell Berry was farming and writing with the purity of food in mind. For the last five decades, he has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of Berry's influence, Michael Pollan offers an introduction to this new collection. "To read the essays in this sparkling anthology," he writes, "many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s,...

At the age of 60, a Kentucky man decides to find out why half a century earlier his favorite uncle was shot, a crime for which the killer spent only two years in jail. The man was nine years old when the incident occurred and nobody would give him a reason.

"The reasoned and insistent exhortations of a man with a cause who, rather than mellowing with age and wisdom, continues to grow in forcefulness and vision." —Booklist



Over the years, Wendell Berry has sought to understand and confront the financial structure of modern society and the impact of developing late capitalism on American culture. There is perhaps no more demanding or important critique available to contemporary...

Unfortunately, on occasions too frequent and destructive to enumerate, the teachings of Christ have been either ignored or distorted by the very people calling themselves Christian. Whether directed towards social intolerance or attitudes of warlike aggression, these right–wing citizens have claimed a power of influence that far exceeds their numbers. Blessed Are the Peacemakers collects the sayings of Jesus, selected by Wendell Berry,...

An urgent, visionary, and heartfelt collection of essays focused on recovering deeper, time–honored values against the ravages of modern society.

. In six elegant, linked literary essays, Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever–widening cleft between the words and their referents mirrors the...