Marce Catlett

Port William

by Wendell Berry

In the newest novel in the Port William series, Wendell Berry’s beloved protagonist Andy Catlett tells the inspiring story of his grandfather, Marce Catlett, to his own children and grandchildren, and gives them a key to their place on the settled land they all love

Andy Catlett’s story begins as his grandfather, Marce Catlett, rises in the dark to go from his farm, by horseback and train, to Louisville for the sale of his tobacco crop at the auction house. The price paid for each year’s crop is determined and destroyed by the power of a single buyer, James B. Duke. This year is especially grim since the price offered to each grower is less than the expense of bringing the crop to market. A year’s worth of labor is lost.

Marce returns to his family determined to discover some way to proceed. Many of his fellow farmers lack the resiliency and resourcefulness to continue, and the end for them is nearing. But only with the help of other neighbors and growers can a way be found that protects the farmers and keeps these rural families vital and in place.

The power and depth of this story—and of the many stories within the Port William Membership—resonate with love, memory, kindness, and a sense of eternity. In Marce Catlett, celebrated author Wendell Berry brings to life a character that the devoted readers of the series will cherish. This moving story is a testament to the goodwill that lives within the human heart and a stirring reminder that standing up for what we believe in is always a cause worth fighting for.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Nature, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Novels, Agriculture

153 pages, Hardcover

First published October 7, 2025

About the author

Wendell 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."

Reviews

[Angela M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of this short novel portrays what readers of Berry’s Port William stories have come to know and love : the legacy of the land, of the farming life, of family, of community and so much more carried forward through generations by the stories kept and told and retold. A quiet place and time in many respects, but not always an easy place to live as life doles out the good and the bad, as it does no matter where or when . The determination and steadfastness of Marce Catlett in the face of adversity is the stuff this place is made of and the stuff that the Catlett’s share from one generation to the next . It’s beautifully told as I have come to expect from Wendell Berry. While he does a great job of illustrating that the farming life is not easy, I have to admit that I there were too many details of the planting and preparing the tobacco crop than I was interested in, reading like a non fiction manual to me. It probably would have been 5 stars if not for that. Berry fans will love the writing and the message.

I received a copy of this from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a book that at times feels like a lament for the passing of a golden time in history, Wendell Berry has written Andy Catlett’s reminiscence of his family’s life, especially over the past 100+ years since the day Marce Catlett sold his tobacco crop and received nothing to bring home to his waiting family. This is the story of life on small family farms in tobacco country in Kentucky, life around Port William. It’s the story of hard work, dedication to family and neighbors, sharing success and failure, living with the vagaries of the natural world. Above all it is about family and place, the land itself.

Berry is very much a part of this novel, occasionally speaking in his own voice about things that concern him, but they are the things that concern any and all who have been small family farmers in what has become now a mechanized, impersonal business existing on large, even huge scales. Andy (and Berry) acknowledge real and important reasons for the decline of tobacco itself, but separate that from the importance of the farming culture, the closeness of family and community and their combined closeness to the land.

The writing is as always with Berry excellent and powerful. There are sections given over to descriptions of growing and production of tobacco leaves for sale that provide somewhat more than I care to know but do prove just how much work and skill these farmers put into their crops, year in and year out. It also shows the importance of friends and neighbors. While this may not be my favorite of Berry’s books emotionally, I’m finding that it has an intensity and love for its subject that is growing on me. I believe it is an important addition to the Port William canon.

Rating 4.5 rounded to 5*

Thank you to Counterpoint Press and NetGalley for an eARC of this book. This review is my own.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a hybrid novel/essay/reminiscence written as fiction in the persona of Andy Catlett in old age. A lament for the loss of an old way of life that lost out to "progress", and the realization that there's nothing he can do. Berry steps into the pages himself to decry corporate greed and wealthy politicians in it for their own gain. And yes, he mentions Donald Trump. We are also treated to a step by step explanation of farming tobacco, which seemed to bore a few readers, but I grew up in a tobacco farming community in NC, so "setting", "topping", " stripping" and "curing" tobacco were familiar terms to me.

With each new book published by Wendell Berry, I hold my breath it's not the last. May he write forever.

[Jonathon Crump · Rating 5 out of 5]

In December of 2022, I was working at a coffee shop and reading The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy. In between customer interactions and chores, I’d read the book, which was new at the time and ended up being the great American author’s last work (along with Stella Maris). Though I brought a book to work almost every day, I never received so many comments as I did when reading The Passenger. Customers would tell me they were dying to start the book, talk about other books by McCarthy, or ask me if I thought it would be his last. All these interactions felt like a testament to how significant McCarthy, who died the next year in 2023, was to literature. Despite how flooded our culture is with entertainment, that one book elicited dozens of responses. That book was an event.

Now, three years later, there’s another event. Wendell Berry, born just one year after McCarthy in 1934, today released what may very well be his last novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story.

The book is another entry in Berry’s Port William series, which started in 1960 when Berry published Nathan Coulter.

Read the rest of my review on Common Good https://commongoodmag.com/in-marce-ca...

[Bekah · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s hard to give Berry 3 stars, but this book didn’t capture me the way his other fiction does.

Berry personally identifies with Andy Catlett and in many ways, this seemed like a bit of a farewell book from Andy (Wendell) to us—which is lovely in its own rite. And for someone who believes Berry is the best writer alive today, it was certainly a precious farewell.

What I didn’t expect was what felt like several essays on Burley Tobacco—its production, the history of its rise and fall, and the generalized personal effect it had on those who called it livelihood. These are absolutely all things in Berry’s wheelhouse, but the lines between fiction and essay were too blurred for me in this volume when I was expecting more of a Port William story and got a treatise instead. (A very well-written treatise, of course.)

[Megan Gibbs]

To all Port William fans: So exciting, I’ve just discovered A NEW BOOK published this October - had to share with all my GR friends who love this community as much as I do ☺️

[Melissa Grice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not one of Berry’s best stories but I enjoyed it. It’s framed very loosely around a simple plot, but it’s really a blend of fiction and his non-fiction writings. Since I like his non-fiction I still liked the book, but reader beware that there are entire chapters in this book that don’t even pretend to have a storyline—they are exposition on farming and policy. Berry speaks on the power of generational work and the way communities can preserve the work of their predecessors.

[Esta Doutrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

“…Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude”

I wouldn’t hand this to someone for their first Berry novel, but I suspect it is the most autobiographical of his novels and certainly held a tenderness for me as I closed it, knowing full well it may be the last “new” Berry novel I read. Like Andy, I too give thanks.

[sarah smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

berry does it again. if it weren’t clear before that he’s andy catlett, just read this…
to that end though, quit dancing around the hand. JUST TALK ABOUT IT

[Kevin Vanhoozer · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Because of the story [of getting nothing for the 1906 tobacco crop], there were some kinds of a man that Wheeler could not be, a certain kind that he had to become, and certain things that he had to do. Andy and his children have been similarly limited and prompted by this story" (17).

"Uncle Andrew was 'wild' in a sesne of that term exclusively human. Unlike the wild animals, so called, Andrew Catlett willingly obeyed no law. He defined himself simply by his impulses and his wants. He was too urgently his own, essentially solitary, self even to be cautious" (60).

"He and his household procured a certain wealth from the ground under their feet by means of an inherited wealth in their minds, backs, and hands. They were not going to starve, which meant that past a set limit they would not be poor. The limit would be set by the availability of land and the duration of a culture, both of which, even so soon, were declining into jeopardy" (67).

"For him, morality began with a mortal fear of the waste of daylight, particularly of the morning light. He believed with the passion of old custom and his own long observance that at four o'clock in the morning a man should be awake, on his feet, and at the barn, caring for what needed care, feeding what needed to be fed" (85).

"And then in that country, really all of a sudden, the tie was broken between human work and the descent of light from the free and holy sun. That tie to daylight, freely given, a gift as old as creation, was replaced by bondage, purchased by money, to fuels extracted from the darkness under the earth" (86).

"The new way of farming was not centered upon creatures but upon mechanical and chemical technologies. Its knowledge was scientific and commercial, not local, customary, and personal" (102).

"By 'responsibility' Andy has understood the ability and the readiness to do one's own work and to clean up one's own messes" (111).

"No part of the history of the country during Andy's lifetime is remote from him, for he has lived it, almost all of it, as a countryman in the country where that history has taken place. It is a history not dividable from the story of his life. It is not dividable from his family's story as it has proceeded from that day many winters ago when Marce Catlett's hogsheads of tobacco, his many days of hope and work, put nothing in his pocket. The history of their time is Andy's family's story because Marce's story, becoming Wheeler's story and that of the generations following, has held them in place" (141).

"As they have carried the story, the dead and the living have been carried by it through the breakages of broken times, circling generation by generation back to that distant land, which they have never reached except by trial and in spells, never yet placing two generations securely in succession, the land where more than a century ago Marce Catlett departed with cautious hope in the dark past midnight, came home broke, and in the dark before daylight the next morning went back to work" (151).

[Moonkiszt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll read anything by Wendell Berry.

That said this was a look back at what had been lost from the way of life lived as a family based on tobacco farming. Tobacco for big 'ol smelly cigars - pipes - and as we moderned up, cigarettes. The character Berry speaks through mostly is Wheeler Catlett (Marce's son - Marce btw is short for Marcellus) as he takes on the big bad American Tobacco Company. They are doing their best to run all the farmers out of the tobacco market, and Wheeler works as the catalyst to create a cooperative to work together against the ATC.

I found it ironic that Berry was able with his lovely words to neutralize the awfulness of tobacco and all the people it has ended and turn it into a commodity as healthful as strawberries. Still, it is exciting to have new Wendell Berry words in my hands. He ever reminds us of changes and what 'progress' has disappeared. So much of what we blithely claimed as our own formed our imagined future forevers on the patterns behind us. He does this so completely that all it takes is the sniff of a whisp of pipe smoke to bring it back, along with some unexpected tears. He's got a way with that melancholy magic.

Glad you're back, Wendell, old friend.

26|52:28c

[Kaden Kozler · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.”

Mr Wendell looks back on his life and braids a story that brings us all home, so much so that we cannot tell where Andy’s story stops and Berry’s begins. It is an impossible thought to imagine a world without the brain that has brought Port William into the light—but for now, it is enough to bask in the love of the story, and then to go back out to each of our tobacco fields, wherever—and whatever—they may be.

“And so, maybe the right response is to pray for Wendell Berry—not the old Wendell Berry in Henry County right now, but somehow the young Wendell Berry making the decision Andy Catlett once made: to root himself in a place where he could tell us these stories that require of us to be certain kinds of people, with certain kinds of things we must love and certain kinds of things we must do. That young Berry probably knows that he will end up heartbroken. ‘Oh, stand by him,’ we might pray. ‘Let him come home.’” — Russell Moore

[John Ballenger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegiac. The high marks are beautiful. The problem for me is that the book sometimes seems like a Port William story and sometimes seems like an essay. Andy has always been the Wendell Berry-like character, but here the difference is harder to discern. I’d probably give this a three as a pure story. Still, I’m grateful to have the opportunity to read another of Wendell’s books.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. A poetic meandering of the meaning and importance of the stories we live and then pass on. Berry also elegantly highlights the importance of being truly connected to our work and vocation. Life is not meant to be lived as a cog in a machine.

[Gloriana · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very meh way to start the New Year. For a book titled "the force of a story," there's not much story, and it's not very forceful. The entire book read like a lukewarm bowl of unseasoned and unpleasantly chunky potato soup cooked with too much passive tense and an unhealthy longing to live in the past.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Wendell Berry and the Port William stories, but this novel was a bit of a letdown. It is more a novella and it strikes me as underdeveloped. There is a long excursus into the harvesting of tobacco. It also reiterates a lot of Berry’s beliefs about local community, culture, agriculture, and corporatism. There is far more musing and reflection rather than engagement between characters.

[Carol (Reading Ladies) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the beginning (histfic) until it became nonfiction and preachy. Very confused about whether this is supposed to be fiction or nonfiction.

[Tsung · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I am weary of the dissimulation, greed and new colonialism in the world, I retreat to Port William, a fictional town in Kentucky, for refuge. But this time I find that the world has infiltrated Port William. Wendell Berry has blended a curious mix of fiction, biography, history, agrarian science, sociopolitical commentary and existentialism into this short novel. Plotwise it is straightforward. An honest, hard working farmer is shortchanged by avaricious, faceless corporations. I admire Marce Catelett's resolve in the midst of adversity.

He had been defeated, but he was not destroyed.

The narration starts from Marce Catlett at the depression of 1907, to sons Wheeler and Andrew, down to the main figure, grandson Andy, who takes up the reins of continuing the family business till the present day, in Trump's second presidential term. The way opinions are voiced, I suspect that the author is not only the narrator, but possibly Andy himself. The plot focuses primarily on tobacco farming but it also talks about farming life and farming community, and how small, family run farms are struggling to survive in a world that is relentlessly modernising. Its interesting that the Amish community is thriving despite all the external pressures.

So far as Andy has learned, the Old Order Amish, alone in all the country, have had the wisdom—the divine wisdom, it may be—to give to their own communities a value always primary and preserved by themselves.

The novel could pass off as a commentary, disguised as a story, making observations and dishing out wisdom.

The local farmers

were practicing a kind of self-sustenance that was an ancient wealth sounder than dollars, taken for granted by themselves, necessary to themselves, but in the times soon to come depreciated almost to extinction, and sometimes into helpless poverty

The doctors of the universities regarded it, and regard it still, as “backwardness,” but a culture was what it was, shared and practiced in common by all the kinds and races of the country people, a possession of incalculable worth.

Before his grandfather’s generation, Andy thinks, an authentically settled life in place was not possible because of chattel slavery and its malign influence on everything within its horizon. Slavery was, and it is, correctable only by the courage to connect freedom with responsibility. By “responsibility” Andy has understood the ability and the readiness to do one’s own work and to clean up one’s own messes. That—only that—is anti-slavery. Maybe it can come at last when we have finished with “mobility”—which, despite its several reasons, has always permitted the mobile ones to shed their mistakes in one place by moving off to a “new start” in another place.

It is similarly true that if rural people were to be paid justly for their work and their products, and if most of them should remain together in place, they themselves would solve the so-called rural problems. An example of this is Andy Catlett’s own home country during the best decades of the burley tobacco economy.


The story could also pass as an extended poem, an elegy or a lamentation. But despite everything, it ends with an air of gratitude.

As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.

Wendell Berry writes as exquisitely as ever, but for different reasons I suspect that this could be the last entry into the Port William series.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The newest addition to the Port Williams series, Marce Catlett is a story that somewhat centers around the namesake of the book; someone who is arguably underrepresented across the Port Williams series but clearly plays a central role in the preservation of the community. But more accurately, it is a deeper “historical sermon” of sorts that beautifully retells the macroeconomic story of the Port Williams community (and Kentucky at large) over the last 110 years through the lens of “The Program”.

Simultaneously, it serves as a seemingly somewhat autobiographical reflection of Berry’s own real-life experience as he looks back now at 90 years old. Because of this, the book often seems to merge back and forth between fiction and non-fiction; at times, it feels to be perfectly both. I came to enjoy this and (I think) understand its intention as I read on.

Beginning with a simple, but catalytic event that happened three generations prior at a tobacco sale in Louisville, the book weaves a narrative that, like all of Berry’s work, will test your assumptions about politics, history, economy, community, and what the good life might really include.

At the end of the day, it is about the power of passed-down stories and how they shape the choices that create the reality of those that come next. You’ll also learn a lot about growing tobacco.

I hope this isn’t the last in the series from my favorite author, but if it is, it wouldn’t be a bad one to end on. I loved it, and it makes me want to revisit many of the series counterparts again because it is just that good.

——

“The countryside… has become a place where few people work… where city workers sleep.”

“As people have grown helpless and lonely, they have come to be governed by the most wealthy who rule by the purchase of nominal representatives who, having no longer the use of their own mind, do not know and cannot imagine the actual country by the ruin of which they and their constituents actually lived.”

[Penny -Thecatladybooknook · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded to 4

What starts out as a "true story" that Andy Catlett had heard all of his life told to him by his father about his grandfather and the beginning of the end of tobacco farming in Kentucky in 1906, turns into an essay by Berry about industrialized farming and the fall of communities like Port William where they end up dying away. Andy and his father Will were major characters in several of Berry's other novels that I've read and grew to care for. I enjoyed the first half of this book where Berry continued on with the stories and lives of the Catlett's and neighbors around them, but the last half wasn't definitely not what I wanted (although an important topic related to the true agrarians and how industrialization has basically choked out most of those family farms.). If you've read other works of Berry but enjoy his essays, you may enjoy this book too. It just didn't go the full way of his other books for me.

[Michele Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a lovely combination of essay and novel. It read as though Andy and Wendell were one and the same. This wasn’t really “Marce Catlett” - but the impact a generational story has on the people yet to come. I always join the lament of the loss of “convivial work” alongside Mr. Berry and hope to always add more side-by-side labor to my own children’s stories after reading his work.

[Jessie Wittman]

What a unique blend of essay and story! It defies genre, but I think that made it a bit plodding for me to read. The more fictional and in-scene moments were the ones I enjoyed most. Read it for the scene of Marce on his horse in the pre-dawn and for a the description of the art of producing a tobacco crop in 1940s with the camaraderie of family and community.

[Jeff Hoffmeyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like David’s Psalm 27, this latest Port William story has the feel and form of being authored by a man who is perhaps near the end of his life of prayer, poetry, and work. The concatenation of these things is as prominent as ever in this dithyrambic story of Andy Catlett, Berry’s autobiographical kin. The novel’s title says it all - stories have an unparalleled force in our lives, but only if we allow them their due authority to counter the hegemony of greed and materialism. Berry might write another Port William novel, just like the Boss might go on tour again next summer. For me, whether he does or not is relatively insignificant. What matters most is living the the force of my own story, a story which is “mine” (like Andy’s) only in the acknowledgment of the sacrifice, longing, and lament that is its ground.

[Sarah Feero Webber · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.” 💕

[Holly Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.

I certainly hope that this is not the last treasure we receive from Wendell Berry!

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I hope there is more, this would be a fitting end to Port William. It's about how a a failed tobacco sale powerfully shaped the community over time, bringing people together to fight for its own identity and survival. And of course, it's also about the things Berry always writes about.

How greed helped cause "the traditional subsistence economies of households and neighborhoods" to be "supplanted by the global economy of extraction, consumption, and waste."

How the countryside was once full of life, but how country people were "exiled from their homelands, their histories and memories, their self-subsistent local economies, thus becoming more ignorant and dependent than people ever have been before."

While I mostly feel sadness for what I know to be true for so many communities across the country and because I live in a place whose history is mostly unknown to me, I appreciate how Berry calls us to gratitude in the end: "Andy's grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude."

[Aaron Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was not what I was hoping it would be but it is always a pleasure to return to Port William. It was more about the history of tobacco farming with some fiction around it to place it in Port William. Very interesting though.

[Katherine Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picking up a Wendell book always feels like a catch up phone call with a good friend— at times it felt like he was slipping into essay mode, but beautiful, poignant, and aching Wendell as always

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.”

This is a book about labor and vocation and generations and community and farewells. I don’t want to say goodbye to Port William, but Wendell Berry has ensured that many of us will carry the story beyond his own telling of it.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aw man. He wanted to write an essay but in novel form and it just didn't work for me. Three stars because of course the writing and thinking was superb, but I'll stick to one or the other next time.