Wendell Berry’s indelible portrait of rural America—seen through the lens of Port William, Kentucky—is one of the most fully imagined narratives in American literature. The river town and its environs are home to generations of Coulters, Catletts, Feltners, and other families collectively known as the Membership, women and men whose stories evoke the richness of life in community. Now, in an edition prepared in consultation with the author, Library of America presents the complete Port William novels and stories for the first time in the order of their narrative chronology, revealing as never before the intricate dovetails and beguiling throughlines of Berry’s larger masterpiece.

Collecting two novels and twenty-three stories, this second volume spans the years 1945 to 1978, as Port William lurches into the age of mechanization and confronts the looming possibility of its own disappearance. With families pulling up stakes and moving to the cities, Andy Catlett “thinks of the long dance of men and women behind him” and chooses to stay. As his neighbor Burley Coulter says, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”

The Memory of Old Jack (1974, 1999) is an elegy for the irascible and lovable Jack Beechum, who on the final day of his life relives stories of the land he worked and the people who shaped him. Remembering (1988) finds Andy Catlett, who has lost his right hand in a harvest accident, once again at a crossroads. These novels are framed and reframed by the accompanying stories, among them the final tales centered on beloved characters Burley Coulter and Mat Feltner, “The Dark Country,” “That Distant Land,” and the humorous and heartbreaking “Fidelity.”

This second of three volumes includes an updated chronology of Berry’s life and career, a map of Port William and a Membership family tree, and helpful notes. An earlier volume spans from the Civil War to World War II; a concluding volume will bring the Port William saga to the present.

Jack Shoemaker, editor, was the cofounder and editor-in-chief of North Point Press, and later cofounded Counterpoint Press where, as editorial director, he published the work of Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Anne Lamott, Jane Vandenburgh, and many others. He has worked with Wendell Berry for more than fifty years.