'The World-Ending Fire' collects 31 essential Wendell Berry essays

Early in his professional career, while on the faculty at NYU and living at the epicenter of the literary world, Wendell Berry decided to leave his job and New York City and return home to Henry County, Kentucky, to the place and people that mattered most to him. Upon hearing of his decision, an elder faculty member summoned him to his office with the intention of persuading him to stay. First alluding to Thomas Wolfe’s famous quote “you can’t go home again,” the man went on to argue that “once one had attained the metropolis, the literary capital, the worth of one’s origins was canceled out; there simply could be nothing worth going back to” (“A Native