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Poet, novelist, essayist, and man of letters, Wendell Berry has been writing his accounts of the human condition, the plight of man’s intimate relationship to the natural world, and many other timeless thus ever-timely topics for more than 45 years. Perhaps best described as the late 20^th century’s lone voice for “Agrarian Traditionalism,” Berry fills his fiction and non-fiction writings with a celebration of humanity’s mystery and goodness as informed by local “membership” within the community and native places we call home. Love, grief, forgiveness, grace, treachery, loyalty: all of these words serve as connecting themes in Berry’s writings as he plumbs the depths of human experience.

Berry’s fiction corpus is comprised of eight novels to-date, as well as dozens of short stories that tell the history and life of the Port William membership. A fictional agrarian community located in the boonies of the Kentucky river-bottoms, a county map would show Port William as made up of no more than a handful of commercial buildings and family residences. But as chronicler of the intricate web of relationships among the people, land, and history of Port William, Berry describes a society that can only be known by a certain love and commitment to its native place. Berry said of his first novel, Nathan Coulter, published in 1960, “When I finished work on this book at the end of the 1950s, I thought merely that I had made my start as a writer. I did not know that I had begun an interest in these characters that would still be productive over thirty years later.”

So Berry has spent the last 47 years telling the stories of the various families and personas of Port William, ranging from the life-long bachelor town barber in his novel Jayber Crow, to the chronicles of successive generations of Feltners, Coulters, Catlitts, Branchs, Penns, and Rowenberrys that make up the true identity of the place. In so doing, Berry’s commitment to telling the stories of the Port William natives demonstrates the type of attachment to place that is required of people if like temporal realities like contentment, loyalty, grief, and eternal realities like faith, hope, and love, are to have any bearing on the human soul. Yet far from a nostalgic or dreamlike portrayal of small town life, Berry’s fiction is deeply rooted in harsh reality of modernity, showing the drastic effects that two world wars, the rise of industrial agriculture, generational betrayal, and hyper-mobility have had on traditional ways of life. Though these stories, Berry shows the paradoxical relationship between community life caught up in time and the eternal realities that inform its nature.