Is America Good Enough for Wendell Berry?

Wendell Berry is unquestionably America’s foremost agrarian visionary. His fiction is largely set in a semi-fictional town called Port William, whose “membership” Berry has traced through several generations across dozens of stories. These tales evoke the nobility, beauty, and hardships of farming life. The most recent volume, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, leads readers into life in Port William through Andy Catlett’s recollections. Andy, who serves as a stand-in for Berry himself, tells us of his grandfather Marce and the failure to secure a decent price for his tobacco in a pivotal year, then shows us how this story’s eponymous “force” influences his family’s life.