From the jacket of the 1967 (Harcourt) edition:

A novel of satisfying amplitude, an American pastoral symphony, A Place on Earth has been seven years in the writing, and its appearance is cause for celebration.

The setting is the hill country of northern Kentucky, during the last six months of World War II. The central figure, Mat Feltner, ia s strong and good man whose life is disrupted by the news that his only son is missing in action. But A Place on Earth is far more than the tale of Mat and his wife and daughter-in-law, and their gradual reconciliation to a personal tragedy that is part of a world tragedy. There is a satisfying diversity of secondary characters, a richness of reverberating themes and contrasting episodes from which there gradually emerges a detailed, panoramic picture of a whole community as it voyages through a shattering and ominous period in history.

Wendell Berry is by turns eloquent, moving, and robustly comic, and in celebrating a pattern of existence that now seems almost inevitably doomed, he affirms virtues that most novelists of his generation would ignore or deny. A Place on Earth is a profoundly rewarding book.

Jacket design by Paul Bacon Studio/Loretta Trezzo. 550 pages.

From the back cover of the revised 1983 (North Point) edition:

In A Place on Earth the central character is not a person but a place: Port William, Kentucky, and the farmlands and forests that surround it, and the Kentucky River that runs nearby. This is a region that Mr. Berry knows intimately, both with heart and mind, a region whose faults and virtues he has spent a lifetime studying. In this novel he reveals the deep marriage between the land and its people; as a key figure in the story, the farmer Mat Feltner, puts it, "The earth is the genius of our life. The final questions and answers lie serenely coupled in it."

So the rhythms of the novel are the rhythms of the land. The novel resonates with variations played on themes of change; looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found. The style of the writing is exquisitely adapted to this varying subject, ranging from lyrical, reflective passages to ribald and rollicking farce--but it is unified throughout by Wendell Berry's acute perception and delicate sensibility.

"The revised version of A Place on Earth is a masterpiece--the best thing Wendell Berry has done, a book not to be missed." The New York Times Book Review

"This is not a book to read at a sitting. It needs to be savored. Writen by a craftsman poet, every word is chosen with great care. Many of Berry's poems reveal the same fascination with the rhythms and cycles of rural living as A Place on Earth, just as his essays reflect his integrity and common sense." Newsday

Jacket illustration by Laurie Anderson. 317 pages

Counterpoint (2001) edition: cover design by David Bullen; cover art by Harlan Hubbard, Farm Scene with Sheep, 1935. 321 pages.

A Place on Earth. New York: Avon, 1969.

First Paperback Edition