"In this approach to Wendell Berry's entire literary canon, Janet Goodrich argues that Berry writes primarily as an autobiographer and as such belongs to the tradition of autobiography. Goodrich maintains that whether Berry is writing poetry, fiction, or prose, he is imagining and reimagining his own life from multiple perspectives - temporal as well as imaginative.".

"Through the different vocations that compose his being, Berry imaginatively shapes his experience into literary artifice. Goodrich identifies five of these vocations - the autobiographer, the poet, the farmer, the prophet, and the neighbor - and traces them in the body of Berry's work where they are consistently identifiable in the authorial voice and obvious to the imagination in fictive characterizations.

Berry's writings express these "personae" as they develop, and it is this complexity of perspective that helps to make Berry vital to such a range of readers as he writes and rewrites his experience."--BOOK JACKET.