In Marce Catlett Wendell Berry Remembers for Us
Hardship fades from memory with each generation. Those who lived it remember the weight of it. Those who didn’t often forget.
Author’s note: This book review originally appeared in Front Porch Republic.
Wendell Berry has spent a lifetime reminding Americans that memory is a form of stewardship. In Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, he does what he has always done best—tell a small (and usually fictional) story that reveals something much larger about who we were as a people and who we are becoming.
This was one of the books I had been looking forward to buying when it was released last year. Instead of purchasing online, I wanted to do it right by making the trip to Kentucky in an effort to support the work and the place that helped shape it. It wasn’t until Veterans Day that I finally made the drive south to visit The Berry Center. Archivist Michele Guthrie gave a wonderful tour, walking through the documents, letters, and history that anchor Berry’s legacy. In one of those moments of near-miss timing that seems fitting in a Berry story, I learned Wendell himself had stopped by unannounced just two days earlier to read during the Kentucky Arts & Letters Day in New Castle.
Wanting to meet the legend himself, I tried to connect the old-fashioned way—calling Berry’s landline phone. I spoke with his wife, Tanya, a few times but never managed to schedule a visit. Somehow that felt appropriate. Berry has always written about a world where patience and distance were simply part of life.
Back home, I read Marce Catlett in one sitting, marking up the passages as I went.
Though it’s a short book, the parallels between Berry’s tobacco-farming heritage and my own family’s story in western Kentucky were impossible to miss. My people come from the Pennyrile region of Crittenden County, about 230 miles southwest of Berry’s home in Henry County. Different soil but the same rhythms, tobacco barns, long work days, and a culture that measured people less by what they said than by what they did.
What is remarkable is that Berry continues to write with the same clarity and conviction that defined his work decades ago. His writing, whether poetry, fiction, or essays, has always carried a quiet authority rooted in land, community, and place.
Released on October 7, 2025, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story traces the origins of one of Berry’s most beloved Port William families across three generations. In classic Berry fashion, the novel moves easily through time, reminding readers that the path forward as a society often becomes visible only when we look to the past, to what worked.
The story begins in 1906 when Marcellus “Marce” Catlett takes his tobacco to market in Louisville. It is a difficult journey, but the hardest moment comes when he discovers that the monopolistic American Tobacco Company has driven prices so low that his entire year’s work barely covers the cost of growing the crop and shipping it to market. Marce returns home to tell his family that the effort has been unprofitable, a quiet humiliation familiar to generations of farmers before subsidies came along.
Berry tells the story through the voices of the Catlett men. While fictional, they are counterparts of Wendell (Andy) and his father and grandfather. Marce’s son, Wheeler, and Wheeler’s son, Andy, inherit more than land; they inherit the memory of exploitation. Wheeler eventually becomes a lawyer and helps organize farmers in the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, an effort to secure fair prices and resist corporate control of the market. Andy, also educated by the university, returns to farming and later becomes a writer, reflecting on the traditions and labor that shaped his family.
What Berry captures so well is how hardship fades from memory with each generation. Those who lived it remember the weight of it. Those who didn’t often forget.
The Catlett men oppose industrial farming not simply because of its economics but because of what it does to a way of life. Industrial agriculture replaces relationships with land, animals, and neighbors with efficiency and scale. What disappears is the sense that people and the land belong to each other.
Much of the book lingers in that world that has pretty much vanished: the careful curing of tobacco leaves, the grading, the long days of work done by hand. These passages are not romantic so much as reverent. Berry understands that the craft of farming was never easy, but it was meaningful.
The final chapter, titled “Future,” reads less like prediction and more like reflection. Andy Catlett recounts building a cellar, an act that feels symbolic, digging into the ground to preserve something beneath the surface.
At this stage of Berry’s life, documentation may be the most important work left to him. The goal is not simply to memorialize the past but to remember it clearly enough that those who come after might use it to shape a better future.
That is where I feel how close Berry’s story sits to my own family history. The Ordways settled in western Kentucky shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century and became successful dark fire-cured tobacco farmers. They lived through the Black Patch Tobacco Wars exactly a century later, only for the next generation to endure mechanization and the Great Depression.
Berry’s family values, as expressed through the Catlett man, are those inculcated in my own upbringing, despite it being on the industrialized fringe of Gary, Indiana, in the 1990s. My papaw would have agreed with Uncle Ed Markman that “Never was a man any account that couldn’t keep a sharp knife in his pocket.”
Even though my Dad and I were far removed from agrarianism, the cadence was similar when it came to our garden, along with hunting and fishing: “Morality began with a moral fear of the waste of daylight.” He too “believed with a passion of old custom and his own long observance that at four o’clock in the morning a man should be awake, on his feet, and at the barn, caring for what needed care, feeding what needed to be fed.”
Ordways transferred farm labor into a similar pride that came with fixing things inside and outside the home in the industrial north: “Andy, who had seen and read enough of the fundamental, allegedly degrading work supplied by people thus degraded, took pride, and in fact a good deal of pleasure, in living directly from the work of his own hands.”
I think my dad’s expectation was driven by Papaw’s resistance to “city life” after migrating to Gary, Indiana, in the 1950s. Berry describes the forced transition by which his people, and millions of others, entered the industrial economy: “Thus they were exiled from their homelands, their histories and memories, their self-subsistent local economies, thus becoming more ignorant and dependent than people ever have been before.”
Both Papaw and Dad fell away from the church but found community within the steelworkers union, where they practiced old-world values that Berry describes: “They followed the only rule of membership: When any of them needed help, the others came to help. By extension of their one rule, there was no ‘settling up.’ All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody’s need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.” I can’t count the number of times Dad’s fellow steelworker described him as a man who would give you “the shirt off his back.”
Other than being poor, I can’t speculate on why the Ordways never owned slaves, but I can attest that in dad’s house, personal responsibility was hammered home daily, something also part of Berry’s conditioning: “Slavery was, and it is, correctable only by the courage to connect freedom with responsibility. By ‘responsibility’, Andy has understood the ability and the readiness to do one’s own work and to clear up one’s own messes.”
Lastly, the north could never provide my papaw with the identity of a place to which he belonged, but it was a pension that allowed his return to Kentucky upon retirement in the 80s. Berry knows better than anyone that there is something far deeper than economics at play through our industrial transition: “When the crop, as a family and neighborly enterprise on small farms, disappeared from the country, its culture also disappeared.”
Marce Catlett is more than just a Kentucky story from days past. It’s an American one that describes a world in transition. While the agrarian tradition is unlikely to return to the masses, Berry’s other stories show us that its values can still be translated by those living along the margins of the information age.
In the end, Berry reminds us that stories carry responsibility. At ninety-one, he has done his part by writing them down. The rest of us now have the duty to carry his legacy forward, not just in principle but also in practice. The final lesson: remember what was lost, know what still matters, and take action to build the kind of country we want to leave behind.