A distinguished essayist and accomplished poet, Wendell Berry has also established himself as an important novelist and short-story writer. Since the publication of his first novel, Nathan Coulter (1960), Berry has earned a place as an important American thinker and artist whose philosophy and aesthetics are grounded in a regional, environmentally sound, agrarian approach to community. Berry's fiction, as well as his essays and poetry, are closely tied to the farming community of Port Royal, a small town near the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers. Entrenched in the people and land of this northern Kentucky region, Berry's short fiction focuses on the enduring values of family, moral and environmental responsibility, and tradition.

In Berry's short-fiction collections, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership (1986), Fidelity: Five Stories (1992), and Watch with Me: And Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie...