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Library of America #381
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.
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.
- GenresFictionLiterature
800 pages, Hardcover
Published July 16, 2024
15 people are currently reading
64 people want to read
About the author
Wendell Berry
293 books4,917 followersWendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 18, 2025
Another 600 pages of Port William behind me, attempting a Goodreads blurb seems a tad pretentious and pedestrian. Wendell Berry’s work is just so good.
This is the second Library of America chronological release of Port William stories and novels. The first in the series, which I read a couple of years back, spans the Civil War to the close of WWII. This one takes us post-war through to the ‘70’s.
Given that the stories were not written chronologically, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this volume has a pensive, sadder undertone as old Port William and its residents succumb to the mechanised, industrialised, consumerised post-war world. Beloved characters age and die and the passing of time and old ways defines the telling of many of these tales.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a downer read. The beauty, poignancy, honesty and goodness of all that Berry holds dear shines through it all. In some ways, it’s about the unsullied beauty of truth that may not always - or often - win the day, but about the assurance that truth and beauty is always better.
Berry invites us to join (invest in) the membership of Port William, not by buying mules and growing tobacco, but by caring for and loving the local community around us and land on which we live. It’s the love and loyalty and honesty and frailty of the lives so beautifully crafted by Berry that carry a call - never strident, but humbly assured, that goodness is good, delivered slow enough to sink in through stories that are measured, vivid, immersive, substantial, honest, humble…
I’m guessing this isn’t everyone’s cup of spring water. But I find that these stories have that rare quality of being satisfyingly self-contained as great stories yet holding lessons to ponder and percolate into my own life. It’s like Lewis in the Narnia Chronicles or Tolkien in LOTR. The author sparks reflections about humanity, friendship, hope, the divine, endurance, good and evil. But it’s all wrapped up in a story we care about, that captures our imagination. It’s a far cry from the arrogant dumbness of an author’s ham-fisted, fictionally gift wrapped propositions.
To enter into Berry’s Port William stories is to inhabit the hills and fields surrounding one stretch of the Ohio River in rural Kentucky, to see and smell and celebrate the seasons, to know the long story of family and friendship and neighbourship… There is so much in these pages, I know I’ll be compelled to return.
The Andy Catlett novel contained in the latter part of this book - Remembering - is powerful and quite distinctive out of all the Port William stories I’ve read. It’s a more reflective, inner-life story of redemption, of a way back after loss, of forgiveness sought and granted. But it’s still finds its heart in the embodied, en-landed, relationally and generationally enfolded life of Port William - not as a utopia (although Andy dreams such a place), but as a place known, among people known, one to the other, lived in a long story belonging to them all, past, present and future.
By getting to know the place and the people of these books you’ll be drawn to think more about yourself and your place and your people. It really is a remarkable work. I eagerly await Vol 3 in this series to complete my Wendell Berry Port William collection.
Enough rambling. One way or another, get yourself to Port William.
This is the second Library of America chronological release of Port William stories and novels. The first in the series, which I read a couple of years back, spans the Civil War to the close of WWII. This one takes us post-war through to the ‘70’s.
Given that the stories were not written chronologically, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this volume has a pensive, sadder undertone as old Port William and its residents succumb to the mechanised, industrialised, consumerised post-war world. Beloved characters age and die and the passing of time and old ways defines the telling of many of these tales.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a downer read. The beauty, poignancy, honesty and goodness of all that Berry holds dear shines through it all. In some ways, it’s about the unsullied beauty of truth that may not always - or often - win the day, but about the assurance that truth and beauty is always better.
Berry invites us to join (invest in) the membership of Port William, not by buying mules and growing tobacco, but by caring for and loving the local community around us and land on which we live. It’s the love and loyalty and honesty and frailty of the lives so beautifully crafted by Berry that carry a call - never strident, but humbly assured, that goodness is good, delivered slow enough to sink in through stories that are measured, vivid, immersive, substantial, honest, humble…
I’m guessing this isn’t everyone’s cup of spring water. But I find that these stories have that rare quality of being satisfyingly self-contained as great stories yet holding lessons to ponder and percolate into my own life. It’s like Lewis in the Narnia Chronicles or Tolkien in LOTR. The author sparks reflections about humanity, friendship, hope, the divine, endurance, good and evil. But it’s all wrapped up in a story we care about, that captures our imagination. It’s a far cry from the arrogant dumbness of an author’s ham-fisted, fictionally gift wrapped propositions.
To enter into Berry’s Port William stories is to inhabit the hills and fields surrounding one stretch of the Ohio River in rural Kentucky, to see and smell and celebrate the seasons, to know the long story of family and friendship and neighbourship… There is so much in these pages, I know I’ll be compelled to return.
The Andy Catlett novel contained in the latter part of this book - Remembering - is powerful and quite distinctive out of all the Port William stories I’ve read. It’s a more reflective, inner-life story of redemption, of a way back after loss, of forgiveness sought and granted. But it’s still finds its heart in the embodied, en-landed, relationally and generationally enfolded life of Port William - not as a utopia (although Andy dreams such a place), but as a place known, among people known, one to the other, lived in a long story belonging to them all, past, present and future.
By getting to know the place and the people of these books you’ll be drawn to think more about yourself and your place and your people. It really is a remarkable work. I eagerly await Vol 3 in this series to complete my Wendell Berry Port William collection.
Enough rambling. One way or another, get yourself to Port William.
November 2, 2025
Spectacular, as expected. This second volume of the LOA collection of Berry's Port William stories is beautiful and epic in its scope. I always deeply enjoy my time in this place and among these people, even as I'm forced to grapple with both the ups and downs of the lives of those I encounter. Berry's deft touch lends both humor and poingancy to his tales. And they make me think, about home, about place, and about what it is to live among and truly see people. I recommend these stories most emphatically.
July 29, 2025
I don’t think I liked it as well as the first LOA volume of WB stories and novels, but the prose is so luminous, the sense of place is so present and encompassing, and the characters are so vivid and well developed. These stories become part of you.
September 25, 2024
Library of America’s publishing of Berry’s Port William novels and stories is such a gift. The grand story is now told chronologically, making it all the more potent for readers, whether they be new to Berry’s world or seasoned lovers of it.
I will here comment on the novel Remembering (How can an app dedicated to books not allow a reviewer to use italics?) and the short story “Fidelity.”
Remembering is the story of Andy Catlett’s restoration (salvation would not be too strong of a word) following the loss of his right hand in a farming accident. The title is significant, as Andy’s remembering of his community - “the Membership”, in Berry’s parlance - is precisely what makes him whole, following the loss of his member. Andy is re-membered. The ending causes me to tremble, but I will not delineate it here. Suffice it to say it is one of the most beautiful pictures of forgiveness and salvation that this reader has encountered in his 49 years.
Still overwhelmed by that story, the reader is soon immersed in another, “Fidelity,” and is, with some measure if incredulity, again swept up by and into Berry’s vision of humanity - both what it is, and what it could be. On full display are themes familiar to lovers of Port William: the Membership, the insidious nature of machines and machine-like humans, the power of place and the damning effects of being dis-placed. What makes these themes truly shine is Berry’s brilliant depiction of the police officer Kyle Bode. Bode’s inability to understand Port William and its Membership, and the contrast of his unmasked libertine life with that of the beloved Burley Coulter, makes this great short story perfect.
Berry’s imagined world has changed me, and has given me hope and vision. “For ‘fidelity’ is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” This assurance and conviction must begin and be sustained by a longing, and this longing is precisely what Berry offers.
I will here comment on the novel Remembering (How can an app dedicated to books not allow a reviewer to use italics?) and the short story “Fidelity.”
Remembering is the story of Andy Catlett’s restoration (salvation would not be too strong of a word) following the loss of his right hand in a farming accident. The title is significant, as Andy’s remembering of his community - “the Membership”, in Berry’s parlance - is precisely what makes him whole, following the loss of his member. Andy is re-membered. The ending causes me to tremble, but I will not delineate it here. Suffice it to say it is one of the most beautiful pictures of forgiveness and salvation that this reader has encountered in his 49 years.
Still overwhelmed by that story, the reader is soon immersed in another, “Fidelity,” and is, with some measure if incredulity, again swept up by and into Berry’s vision of humanity - both what it is, and what it could be. On full display are themes familiar to lovers of Port William: the Membership, the insidious nature of machines and machine-like humans, the power of place and the damning effects of being dis-placed. What makes these themes truly shine is Berry’s brilliant depiction of the police officer Kyle Bode. Bode’s inability to understand Port William and its Membership, and the contrast of his unmasked libertine life with that of the beloved Burley Coulter, makes this great short story perfect.
Berry’s imagined world has changed me, and has given me hope and vision. “For ‘fidelity’ is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” This assurance and conviction must begin and be sustained by a longing, and this longing is precisely what Berry offers.
March 23, 2025
a wonderful compendium of great stories
Wendell Berry combines a rich love for the land and the people on it, and for a form of community living that’s rare today but true to the period, where the machines were only starting to dictate terms to farmers who knew what the land needed and how to provide that.
The stories are beautiful in their connectedness to each other, and in their treasuring of the people who worked together without thought of payment, knowing they all benefited from that connectedness, and I’m so grateful to Mr Berry for the artistry he has brought us in this and all the books and stories he’s gifted us with.
Wendell Berry combines a rich love for the land and the people on it, and for a form of community living that’s rare today but true to the period, where the machines were only starting to dictate terms to farmers who knew what the land needed and how to provide that.
The stories are beautiful in their connectedness to each other, and in their treasuring of the people who worked together without thought of payment, knowing they all benefited from that connectedness, and I’m so grateful to Mr Berry for the artistry he has brought us in this and all the books and stories he’s gifted us with.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews