Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

Book-length works by recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award (2006-2010) and Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award (2011-) are arranged below in alphabetical order by author. To find an individual honoree’s works, click on her or his name.

Lifetime Achievement Award

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The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

Wendell Berry

A probing, personal inquiry into the way in which we use the farmlands that sustain us, and the roots of American attitudes towards farming.
The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays

Wendell Berry

In a democratic commonwealth, what are the costs and consequences of rugged individualism? What, in the fullest sense, is involved in our National Security? When considering Weapons of Mass Destruction, does our inventory include soil loss, climate change, and ground water poisoning? And should we add Economic Weapons of Mass Destruction to our list of targets? Whose freedom are we considering when we speak of the "free market" or "free enterprise"? What is the price of ownership without affection? These and several other questions lie at the heart of Wendell Berry's latest collection of essays, writing "motivated by fear of our violence to one another and to the world, and my hope that we might do better." Setting aside abstraction in favor of clarity, coherence, and passion, this new book provides a setting of immediate danger and profound hope.
The Wheel

Wendell Berry

Poems
The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

Wendell Berry

A collection of stories about the fictional community of Port William, Kentucky, where "the concept of membership, of individuals as parts of a community, each affecting all the others, lies at the heart" of it all.
The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

A collection of essays celebrating the cultural heritage of history and home argues that arrogance must be abandoned in favor of respect and care for oneself, one's neighbors, and the land.
This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

Wendell Berry

For nearly thirty-five years, Wendell Berry has been at work on a series of poems occasioned by his solitary Sunday walks around his farm in Kentucky. From riverfront and meadows, to grass fields and woodlots, every inch of this hillside farm lives in these poems, as do the poet’s constant companions in memory and occasion, family and animals, who have with Berry created his Home Place with love and gratitude.

There are poems of spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics that include some of the most beautiful domestic poems in American literature, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials.
Three Short Novels

Wendell Berry

Furthering his series on the denizens of Port William, Three Short Novels brings together some of Wendell Berry's best-loved shorter novels--Nathan Coulter, Remembering , and A World Lost . When Nathan Coulter first appeared in 1960, no one could have known that this exquisite coming-of-age tale was introducing us to one of our most distinctive fictional communities: Port William, Kentucky.
Two More Stories of the Port William Membership

Wendell Berry
Watch with Me: And Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and his Wife, Miss Minnie, nee Quinch

Wendell Berry

In these seven interrelated stories we are again invited to Port William, Kentucky. Rich with humor and wisdom, this collection describes the depth of affection and tolerance for eccentricity that these neighbors bear toward one another, and highlights the comic and often poignant ways they cope with the intrusions of the 20th century into their idyllic, agrarian world.
Wendell Berry: Essays 1969-1990.

Wendell Berry

In celebration of Berry’s extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume edition of his essays, selected by the author and his longtime editor, Jack Shoemaker, which reveals as never before the evolution of Berry’s thoughts and concerns as a farmer, neighbor, citizen, teacher, activist, and ecological philosopher. This first volume includes the whole of Berry’s now classic book The Unsettling of America (1977) and thirty-two essays from eight collections published from 1969 to 1990: The Long-Legged House (1969), The Hidden Wound (1970), A Continuous Harmony (1972), Recollected Essays: 1969–1980 (1981), The Gift of Good Land (1981), Standing by Words (1983), Home Economics (1987), and What Are People For? (1990).
Wendell Berry: Essays 1993-2017

Wendell Berry

This second volume in the Library of America edition of Wendell Berry’s essays presents writings from the latter half of his career, including the entirety of Life Is a Miracle (2000) and forty-two essays from nine other books published from 1993 to 2017: Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (1993), Another Turn of the Crank (1995), Citizenship Papers (2003), The Way of Ignorance (2005), What Matters? (2010), Imagination in Place (2010), It All Turns on Affection (2012), Our Only World (2015), and The Art of Loading Brush (2017).
What Are People For?: Essays

Wendell Berry

Essays on Nate Shaw, Harry Caudill, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, diversity, waste, eating, local culture, consumption, conservation, environmental concerns, and other topics.
What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry offers essays from over the last 25 years, alongside new essays about the recent economic collapse, including "Money Versus Goods" and "Faustian Economics," treatises of great alarm and courage. He offers advice and perspective that should be heeded by all concerned as our society attempts to steer from its present chaos and recession to a future of hope and opportunity. With urgency and clarity, Berry asks us to look toward a true sustainable commonwealth, grounded in realistic Jeffersonian principles applied to our present day.
Window Poems

Wendell Berry

Composed while Wendell Berry looked out the multipaned window of his writing studio, this early sequence of poems contemplates Berry’s personal life as much as it ponders the seasons he witnessed through the window.
Sabbaths 2016

Wendell Berry, Wesley W. Bates, Leslie Shane, Carolyn Whitesel, and Gray Zeitz

The fifteen Sabbath poems here include "What Passes, What Remains," a longer narrative poem that was first published in The Art of Loading Brush (Counterpoint, 2017). Other poems from 2016 have been published in Oxford American, Spring 2018.
Traveling at Home

Wendell Berry and John DePol

The fifteen poems and one essay included here, personally selected by Wendell Berry from among his previously published work, quietly and joyously celebrate the enduring satisfactions of good work and a happy home.
Conversations with Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry and Morris Allen Grubbs

Since 1960, Wendell Berry (b. 1934) has produced one of the most substantial and consistently thematic bodies of work of any modern American writer. In more than fifty books in various genres-novels, short stories, poems, and essays-he has celebrated a life lived in close communion with neighbors and the earth and has addressed many of our most urgent cultural maladies. His collections of essays urge us to think and act responsibly as members of a community-both human and natural. Volumes of his poems seek to wed us to nature and realign our vision with its mysteries. His growing Port William cycle of novels offers us a fictional model for understanding, for compassion, and for living in constant regard for others.

Conversations with Wendell Berry gathers for the first time interviews with the writer, ranging from 1973 to 2006, including one never before published. For readers acquainted with Berry's work, this volume offers insights available nowhere else. It reveals succinctly the main currents of his life's work. What emerges is a citizen-writer profoundly affected by cultural crises at home and in the world.
The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge

Wendell Berry and Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World

Wendell Berry and Davis Te Selle

A white-footed mouse is swept away in a flood and must carefully watch and wait until it is safe to make a home in its new surroundings.
At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68

Taylor Branch

At Canaan's Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a place next to James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of American history.
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63

Taylor Branch

Chronicles the civil rights struggle from the twilight of the Eisenhower years through the assassination of President Kennedy.
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65

Taylor Branch

In Pillar of Fire, the second volume of his America in the King Years trilogy, Taylor Branch portrays the civil rights era at its zenith. The first volume, Parting the Waters, won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Pillar of Fire covers the far-flung upheavals of the years 1963 to 1965 - Dallas, St. Augustine, Mississippi Freedom Summer, LBJ's Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Vietnam, Selma. And it provides a frank, revealing portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. - haunted by blackmail, factionalism, and hatred while he tried to hold the nonviolent movement together as a dramatic force in history. Allies, rivals, and opponents addressed racial issues that went deeper than fair treatment at bus stops or lunch counters. Participants on all sides stretched themselves and their country to the breaking point over the meaning of simple words: dignity, equal votes, equal souls. Branch brings to bear fifteen years of research - archival investigation; nearly two thousand interviews; new primary sources, from FBI wiretaps to White House telephone recordings - in a seminal work of history.
The Cartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA

Taylor Branch

"Corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as "student athletes".. deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution." Decades of greed and self-interest pushed the NCAA to collapse under the weight of its hypocrisy. The parasitic business of college sports generates billions every year, yet fails to compensate college athletes.
The Clinton Tapes: Conversations with a President, 1993-2001

Taylor Branch

The Clinton Tapes highlights major events of Clinton’s two terms, including war in Bosnia, the anti-deficit crusade, health reform failure, anti-terrorist strikes, peace initiatives, the 1996 re-election campaign, and Whitewater investigations culminating in his 1999 impeachment trial.
The Empire Blues: A Novel

Taylor Branch