The life of [community] has been very little regarded in American literature. Our writers have been much more concerned with the individual. . . . From Thoreau to Hemingway and his successors, a great deal of sympathy and interest has been given to the individual as pariah or gadfly or exile. In Faulkner, a community is the subject, but it is a community disintegrating, as it was doomed to do by the original sins of land greed, violent honor, and slavery. . . .

Wendell Berry, "Writer and Region," from What Are People For?