Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth

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In 1960, three years after he completed his master’s degree in English at the University of Kentucky and married, Wendell Berry started working on “his first full-length novel”,

A Place on Earth

, which was published by Harcourt, Brace, and World in 1967, so during the Cold War (Bilbro 2010, 89). In a 2022 interview with

The New Yorker

, Berry describes the process of writing this “ambitious regional novel” as “a long and awkward struggle” that led him to be “stuck and depressed”, which could have been worse had he not been encouraged and guided by his editor at Harcourt, Dan Wickenden (Wickenden 2022). As Wickenden’s daughter explains in the article resulting from this interview, however, Berry refused to follow most of her father’s advice at the time, rejecting any…

2992 words

Citation: Lombard, David. "A Place on Earth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 April 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=40799, accessed 21 November 2024.]

40799 A Place on Earth 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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