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Wendell Berry’s first book, Nathan Coulter was published in 1960. This short novel about one momentous year in the life of a boy growing up on a farm in the fictional community of Port William, Kentucky was completed while Berry was at Stanford University, where he studied as a Wallace Stegner Fellow and then taught for a year. Though Berry has said that even he didn’t know it at the time, Nathan Coulter would become the wellspring for a series of novels and short stories about several generations in the life of that community. In 1985, Berry made some text changes for a new edition to synchronize its timelines with other Port William books.
The edition used on bookclub@ket is found in a 2002 hardback titled Three Short Novels, including Nathan Coulter and two other Port Williams books: Remembering and A World Lost. It is part of a project by Counterpoint Press to publish all of the Port William novels and stories in five uniform volumes.
Card catalog entry from the Library of Congress
Blurbs from the book jacket
Amazon.com information page
Barnes and Noble information page
Another of the Port William novels—and one of Berry’s masterpieces—is The Memory of Old Jack, which was the very first bookclub selection in January 1999.
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