Wendell Berry is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose steady literary achievement has earned him wide recognition both as an artist and as a spokesman for contemporary environmental concerns. Amid the more frequent and more widely ranging poetry and essays, his fiction has sustained a constant center, a native ground, where he explores the rich dramatic possibilities latent within the history of his singular subject--the small-farming tradition in America. Berry is preeminently a philosopher-poet who has wedged in the path of inexorable Progress the ancient, stable traditions of agrarian societies, based on an understanding of agriculture-as-culture, of farming as art and religion. His designs are equally ancient and traditional as he engages both the dulce and utile. Indeed his novels are at times both lyrical and instructive as they explore a way of life less encumbered (though in its way no less complex) than that of modern...