An author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, Wendell Berry has received high praise from major nature writers such as Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. Stegner, with whom Berry studied, comments, "It is hard to say whether I like this writer better as a poet, an essayist, or a novelist. He is all three at a high level," and Abbey proclaimed Berry to be "the best essayist now working in America." Indeed, even within a single genre--nonfiction prose, the primary form of traditional nature writing--Berry's work ranges widely, with certainty and force, addressing manifold purposes, audiences, and topics.

The autobiographical, personal essay dominates Berry's early work, essays such as those collected in The Long-Legged House (1969), The Hidden Wound (1970), and The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (1971); a transitional book, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1972), includes autobiographical essays mixed with...