From the front flap:

Unconsciously perhaps from the beginning, and more and more consciously during the last sixteen or seventeen years, my work has been motivated by a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native land and chosen place. As I have come to understand it, this is a long term desire, proposing the work not of a lifetime but of generations. (from the author's forward)

These eleven essays, selected by the author from five previous collections, provide us with a single volume tracing this desire throughout Mr. Berry's writing career. Essays are drawn from The Long-Legged House, The Hidden Wound, The Unforeseen Wilderness, A Continuous Harmony, and The Unsettling of America. A new essay, "The Making of a Marginal Farm," forms the coda, unifying "what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households."

"Wendell Berry is a good novelist, a fine poet, and the best essayist now working in America."

Edward Abbey

Jacket design by David Bullen. Jacket illustration based on a photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. 340 pages.

Contents:

I. from The Long-Legged House (1969)

The Rise
The Long-Legged House
A Native Hill

II. from The Hidden Wound (1970)

Nick and Aunt Georgie

III. from A Continuous Harmony (1972)

Discipline and Hope

IV. from The Unforeseen Wilderness (1971)

A Country of Edges
An Entrance to the Woods
The Unforeseen Wilderness
The Journey's End

V. from The Unsettling of America (1977)

The Body and the Earth

VI. (1980)

The Making of a Marginal Farm