A Place on Earth was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1967 and is Berry’s most ambitious early novel — a large, slow, deeply felt work about the community of Port William, Kentucky, during the final months of World War II. Where Nathan Coulter was lean and focused on a single consciousness, A Place on Earth is choral: it follows an entire community as they wait for news of sons and husbands overseas, as they work the land despite uncertainty, as they lose people and endure.
The Novel
The central narrative concerns Mat Feltner, whose son Virgil is missing in action in Europe. The telegram has come; nothing follows. Mat and his wife Margaret wait — and the community waits with them, because in Port William, one family’s grief belongs to everyone.
Around this waiting, Berry orchestrates the daily life of the community: plowing, planting, the spring flood, conversations in Jayber Crow’s barbershop, the rhythms of the farming year that continue regardless of war and loss. The novel argues implicitly that this continuation — the stubbornness of daily work, the persistence of community obligation — is itself a form of faith.
Other stories interweave: Ernest Finley, an older farmer whose physical strength is failing; Burley Coulter, Nathan’s uncle, who drinks too much and loves too freely; the black families whose labor sustains the community but whose full membership in it remains incomplete.
Revision
Berry substantially revised the novel for the 1983 North Point Press edition, cutting approximately one-third of the text. He considered the original Harcourt edition overwritten — too much description, too many passages where the prose drew attention to itself rather than serving the story. The revised edition is his preferred text and is tighter, more powerful.
This creates a bibliographic curiosity: the 1967 first edition is the scarcer and more valuable book, but the 1983 revision is the better novel. Collectors prize the original; readers should seek the revision.
Themes
Waiting — the novel captures the peculiar agony of wartime uncertainty: the telegram that may or may not mean death, the silence that extends for weeks and months, the impossibility of mourning without certainty.
Community — Port William functions as it always does in Berry’s fiction: imperfectly but genuinely. People show up. They bring food. They sit with the grieving. They don’t always say the right thing, but they are present.
The land — the farming year continues because it must. Crops don’t wait for telegrams. Berry sees this not as heartlessness but as sanity: the land’s demands anchor people when grief threatens to unmoor them.
Collecting A Place on Earth
First edition (Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1967): Green cloth binding. Dust jacket with pastoral landscape.
Identification points:
- Harcourt, Brace & World imprint
- “First edition” indicated by letter code on copyright page
- 382 pages (substantially longer than the revised edition)
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $400–$1,000. Berry’s second novel, published by a major house — the first printing was modest but not tiny.
Signed copies: $1,000–$2,500. Uncommon from this period.
The 1983 revised edition (North Point Press) — Berry’s preferred text — brings $75–$150 in jacket.
The novel holds a special place for Berry’s devoted readers as the book where Port William becomes a fully realized world — larger and more peopled than Nathan Coulter, warmer and more communal.