NEW YORK — Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian who in poems, stories, novels and essays celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned of the excesses and misjudgments of an industrial, commercialized society, has died. He was 92.
His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed on Monday that he died in his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.
“There’s not enough I could say about him to do him justice,” she told The Associated Press.
Few authors were more tied to their home than Berry, an intellectual and spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau and such Southern agrarians as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom.
In prose and poetry that mirrored the uncluttered and deeply felt life he advocated, Berry challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness and renewed the mysteries of birth, love, work and death. He had learned from his own history: Berry was born and raised in a farming town during the Great Depression and watched its seemingly immortal ties unravel by his teens.
“Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world,” he wrote in “Andy Catlett: Early Travels,” a novel published in 2006, “and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater.”
“The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.”
Berry was a prolific writer who published more than 40 books, including the novels “Nathan Coulter” and “A Place on Earth,” and the anthology “A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.” His legacy extended well beyond Kentucky. Michael Pollan, author of such bestsellers as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” would say his life was changed by Berry’s declaration that “Eating is an agricultural act.” The chef and food activist Alice Waters cited him as a favorite author and wrote an introduction to Berry’s 1989 essay “The Pleasures of Eating.”
He was among the most prominent authors never to receive a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award, although his honors included a National Humanities Medal and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, he was presented a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.
A simpler time
The tall, slender Berry imagined, chronicled and lived out his vision of a self-sustaining community in which no one had to ask where their food came from or the names of their neighbors. In the classic farming manifesto “The Unsettling of America,” published in 1977, he attacked the consolidation and mechanization of agriculture as a violation of the natural order, whether of the land or of the spirit.
“The modern urban‐industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth,” he wrote. “At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and experts sets up a profit‐making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation.”
His disdain for modernity touched upon virtually every aspect of life, from dancing to weather forecasts to birth control, opinions he well knew were not universally shared. Reviewing a Library of America anthology of his nonfiction, The New York Times’ Dwight Garner wrote that Berry “bangs the same themes so relentlessly — the perils of industrial agriculture, the decimation of rural life, America’s blind faith in technology — that one’s eyes begin to cross.”
Most of his fiction, closely based on his childhood, was set in rural Port William and populated with such characters as drunken Uncle Peach, the drowned Chicken Little, the wise and patient farm hand Dick Watson and Andy Catlett, Berry’s alter ego, a boy “inclined to be dreamy” and “slide right out of the present world.”
His worldview was shaped by an ancient sense of continuity and connection, like in the story “Watch with Me,” when a troubled man known as “Nightlife” picks up an old shotgun and disappears into the woods. A local posse follows, led by the farmer Tol Proudfoot, who worries Nightlife might kill himself or harm others. The pursuit is long and exhausting. “I reckon it would be better not to have got involved,” Tol admits to himself. But he knows that he will continue “until whatever happened that would allow him (Tol) to cease to go along had happened.”
“I reckon I am involved,” Tol discovers.
Berry yearned for the past but was “painfully divided” by his awareness that “my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors” and that “people were once bought and sold here by my people.” He saw the U.S. as plagued by “disorderly violence,” and inflamed by the rootlessness of the early settlers and the corporations that followed.
“We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America,” he lamented.
History led to some controversial opinions — Berry would regard the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as more “a tragic figure” than an upholder of slavery — and a clash among Berry, the University of Kentucky and some of its students. Berry’s wife Tanya was the niece of artist Ann Rice O’Hanlon, whose Great Depression era fresco about Lexington history has long been controversial for its alleged sanitizing of slavery. Wendell and Tanya Berry filed a lawsuit in 2020 that objected to its removal from the school. Three years earlier, he had defended the fresco as a painful, but realistic portrait.
“Black people did work in tobacco fields,” he wrote. “Black musicians did play for white dancers.”
Berry shunned the unnatural world whenever, and however possible. For decades, he and his wife ran a hillside organic farm in Henry County. They lived without computers, television or phones, but did install solar units in 2005, an act of defiance and of commitment to clean energy in a state powered by coal. Well before his lawsuit against the University of Kentucky, his alma mater, he cut ties after the school accepted $7 million for a new basketball dormitory from a group of donors organized by a coal company president. In 2011, he joined a sit-in at the governor’s office in protest of strip-mining.
In love with the universe
Berry was born in Henry County in 1934, and he moved with his family soon after to New Castle, where his father practiced law and all worked on his grandfather’s farm. As a teenager he graduated from the Millersburg Military Institute and entered the University of Kentucky. In college, Berry helped edit the campus magazine “Green Pen,” read the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and first encountered the agrarian publication “I’ll Take My Stand.” The 1930 release included contributions from Warren and Ransom among others who would later distance themselves from a racist and romanticized view of the rural South held by many agrarians.
By his early 20s, he was publishing poems and stories and even spent time away from Kentucky. He received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University in 1958 and stayed on another year as a visiting lecturer. He also lived in New York, in the early 1960s, but soon purchased Lanes Landing and settled there at the end of the decade.
Berry enjoyed the friendship of such fellow writers as Donald Hall and Bobbie Ann Mason, but was inspired more by Kentucky’s land and resources, by the knowledge that he might stand before the same body of water his grandparents drank from. Berry placed himself and fellow humans in a small and blessed role — “sweetly enabled” — within a grand and ordered universe.
“And so I go into the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place,” he once wrote. “I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces. I feel my life take its place among the lives — the trees, the annual plants, the animals and birds, the living of all these and the dead — that go and have gone to make the life of the earth.”
