Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories: The Later Years (Loa #406)

Library of America caps its definitive edition of Wendell Berry's complete Port William saga, arranged by the author for the first time in order of the narrative chronology.

Includes 8 new and uncollected short stories, including 6 published here for the first time.

For more than sixty years, Wendell Berry conjured the interconnected lives of the people of the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, in a multi-generational saga that spans from the Civil War to the present day. Now Library of America completes its definitive edition of this extended masterpiece, prepared in consultation with the author before his death and presenting the complete story for the first time in the order of narrative chronology.

This final volume contains 16 stories, 8 published or collected here for the first time, and 3 novels that take the story of the Port William Membership (as the townfolk are known) forward to the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, as the community faces the looming possibility of its own disappearance.

The novels Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter both tell of outsiders who move into Port William and are soon deeply enmeshed into the fabric of life there. Jayber becomes the town barber-philosopher, and though a lonely bachelor he learns to commit himself to the town and its membership. Hannah joins the membership through her short-lived marriage to Virgil Feltner, who is soon killed in World War II. She chooses to stay in Port William with the Feltners and later with her second husband, Nathan Coulter, and her life story doubles as a meditation on the precious, perilous state of family farming in the postwar decades.

In Berry's final novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, just published in 2025, his most autobiographical character, Andy Catlett, tells of his grandfather's 1906 tobacco crop, which sold for almost nothing. The loss of that crop set three generations of the Catlett family on a new course, and Andy hopes that their story will serve as a guide for the future membership of Port William.