Cirrus@Austlit

In Wendell Berry’s recent collection of essays, The World-Ending Fire, he writes of his decision to leave New York and return home to Kentucky.

That day I had been summoned by one of my superiors at the university, whose intention, I had already learned, was to persuade me to stay on in New York ‘for my own good’ … I had reached the greatest city in the nation; I had a good job; I was meeting other writers and talking with them and learning from them; I had reason to hope that I might take a still larger part in the literary life of that place. On the other hand, I knew I had not escaped Kentucky, and had never really wanted to.

The first essay in the collection sets the tone for Berry’s idiosyncratic literary life. But surely the senior writer had a point – wasn’t Berry sabotaging his career by moving back to the sticks? (Introduction)