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Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 2001)
Recommended by Dr. Gary L. Gregg, II, McConnell Center
The McConnell Center recently had the opportunity to host the great Kentucky writer Wendell Berry on campus (see video link in this issue of Meditations).
Wendell is a poet, an essayist and a novelist who has been writing acclaimed works for more than half a century. Well known as an environmentalist and farmer, Berry is also one of the most important voices in America today expressing concerns with the health of our communities and our fellow citizens who depend on them.
It is his concern with community that I wish to call to your attention today through recommending his masterpiece, Jayber Crow.
Jayber Crow is part of of a series of novels set in the fictional Kentucky town of Port William (based on Wendell’s real hometown of Port Royal, Kentucky). This volume traces the life of the town barber who emigrated to Port William and earned his way into the “membership” of the community through his service cutting hair, digging graves, cleaning the church and becoming friends and partners to the rest of the “membership.”
One needs no familiarity with Wendell’s novels to pick up this book and be deeply sucked into the life of a little rural town in early 20th-century America. Once into that imaginative space, the reader finds it hard not to be profoundly moved by the vitality of a community that still functioned as a traditional society of deep roots and interconnected lives. I don’t know anyone who has read the novel and not come away thinking in new ways about community, love, friendship, changing technology, progress, the relationship between the past and current generation, and the meaning of marriage.
About the Recommender
Dr. Gary L. Gregg, II, has been the director of the McConnell Center since 2000. He is the Mitch McConnell Chair in Leadership at the University of Louisville and is a noted scholar on American constitutional government and the life and legacy of George Washington. He regularly teaches and writes on leadership and is the host of the Center's "Vital Remnants" podcast series.
Views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of the McConnell Center. This recommendation is part of the McConnell Center's Meditations publication series for soldiers and students in our Strategic Broadening Seminar. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter