In 1960, three years after he completed his master’s degree in English at the University of Kentucky and married, Wendell Berry started working on “his first full-length novel”,
A Place on Earth, which was published by Harcourt, Brace, and World in 1967, so during the Cold War (Bilbro 2010, 89). In a 2022 interview with
The New Yorker, Berry describes the process of writing this “ambitious regional novel” as “a long and awkward struggle” that led him to be “stuck and depressed”, which could have been worse had he not been encouraged and guided by his editor at Harcourt, Dan Wickenden (Wickenden 2022). As Wickenden’s daughter explains in the article resulting from this interview, however, Berry refused to follow most of her father’s advice at the time, rejecting any…
2992 words
Citation: Lombard, David. "A Place on Earth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 April 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=40799, accessed 27 July 2024.]
