Overview
A comprehensive examination of Berry's entire career. Well organized and comprehensive in scope, the study considers Berry's complete body of work and features a chronology and the text of Angyal's 1991 interview with Berry. Angyal characterizes Berry's work as an attempt to articulate and preserve the best in the agricultural tradition of the author's 1930s boyhood the rural world of the small landowners and tobacco farmers who were the last generation of skilled men to use their own hands to work the land. Angyal convincingly presents Berry's body of work as an ardent espousal of Thomas Jefferson's agrarian ideal of a nation of small farmers and reveals the reformist social and ecological agenda underlying Berry's literary vision. Angyal concludes that Berry's advocacy of traditional rural life is both balanced and sharpened with an informed ecological vision and deep understanding of the complex relationships among the individual, the family, the community, and the environment.
