From Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Postwar Years)
In 1991, the novelist Wallace Stegner, then 82 years old, wrote an essay about Wendell Berry, his former student, and he styled the piece as if it were a letter. “You tried the wider world for a few years, at Stanford, in New York, on a year’s Guggenheim in Italy, and eventually you concluded that you belonged back in Kentucky, where you had come from. That was a move as radical as Thoreau’s retreat to Walden, and much more permanent. I am sure that people told you you were burying yourself, that you couldn’t come into the literary world with manure on your barn boots and expect to be welcomed, that you owed it to yourself and your gift to stay out where the action was. I was myself guilty of trying to persuade you against your decision, for some time in the 1960s.”
An assistant professor of English at New York University, Berry had already published a well-received first novel, Nathan Coulter, and won the Vachel Lindsay Prize for his poetry when he was offered a position as professor of English at the University of Kentucky. As he explained in an interview years later, “When I got the offer to come back to Kentucky, we knew, first of all, that we wanted to come back. Also, it had become fairly plain to me that I was a Kentucky writer; I wasn’t going to be a New York writer. I’d just lived in Kentucky too long.” He and his family moved to Kentucky in the fall of 1963, and the following year he purchased Lanes Landing Farm, first as a weekend retreat and then as a year-round home, where they have lived ever since.
“I remember a moment—in 1965, or a little after—when I realized that I didn’t have to be a writer,” he told another interviewer in 1998. “There were other kinds of work also that required artistry and offered satisfaction. From here, looking back, I can see what a defining moment that was. I had, in effect, decided not to be a ‘professional’ writer, but instead, in the literal sense, an amateur: I would work for love.”
Nonetheless, while working a farm that grew to become 117 acres, the “amateur” writer published nine novels and more than sixty short stories, all set in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. At our (free!) Story of the Week site, you can read one of them, “The Discovery of Kentucky,” in which Berry mixes a parade, politics, liquor, and a merry band of would-be pranksters.
