Save $15 when you buy both volumes of the Wendell Berry essays edition in a deluxe boxed set.

In celebration of Berry’s extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume edition of his essays, selected by the author and his longtime editor, Jack Shoemaker, which reveals as never before the evolution of Berry’s thoughts and concerns as a farmer, neighbor, citizen, teacher, activist, and ecological philosopher. This first volume includes the whole of Berry’s now classic book The Unsettling of America (1977) and thirty-two essays from eight collections published from 1969 to 1990: The Long-Legged House (1969), The Hidden Wound (1970), A Continuous Harmony (1972), Recollected Essays: 1969–1980 (1981), The Gift of Good Land (1981), Standing by Words (1983), Home Economics (1987), and What Are People For? (1990).

In The Unsettling of America, Berry explores how and why, even in our modern global economy, locally adapted farming is essential to the flourishing of culture, to healthy living and stable communities, and ultimately to our survival as a species. In his 1995 Afterword to the Third Edition, included here, Berry notes with mounting urgency that his argument about the long-term ecological and human costs of industrial agriculture has “not had the happy fate of being proved wrong.”

Other essays in this volume include his early autobiographical pieces “The Long-Legged House” and “A Native Hill,” the indispensable “Think Little,” “Writer and Region,” “Preserving Wildness,” “The Work of Local Culture,” and the still provocative “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” in which he posits his standards for embracing a new technology, including: “It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.”

Jack Shoemaker, editor, is Editorial Director of Counterpoint Press, publishing the works of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Salter, among many others. He has worked with Berry for more than forty years.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Gould Family Foundation and Walter E. Robb.

Wendell Berry: Essays 1969–1990 is kept in print by a gift from Walter E. Robb to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.