Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian who celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned against the excesses of industrial society, has died. He was 92.
His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed his death on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. Berry was known for his prolific output, publishing more than 40 books of poetry, novels, and essays.
Berry, an intellectual heir to writers like Henry David Thoreau and Southern agrarians Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness. His work often mirrored the uncluttered life he advocated, exploring the mysteries of birth, love, work, and death. He drew from his own experiences, having been born and raised in a farming town during the Great Depression and witnessing its transformation.
"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 his 2006 novel "Andy Catlett: Early Travels." "and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater."
His legacy extended beyond his native Kentucky. Authors such as Michael Pollan and Alice Waters cited Berry's influence. Pollan noted Berry's declaration that "Eating is an agricultural act," while Waters wrote an introduction to his 1989 essay "The Pleasures of Eating."
Though among the most prominent authors never to receive a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award, Berry's honors included a National Humanities Medal and a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2016. He envisioned and chronicled a self-sustaining community where individuals knew the source of their food and their neighbors.
In his 1977 farming manifesto, "The Unsettling of America," Berry criticized the consolidation and mechanization of agriculture, viewing it as a violation of the natural order. He wrote that 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."
His critique of modernity extended to various aspects of life, and The New York Times’ Dwight Garner observed 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."
Much of his fiction, rooted in his childhood, was set in rural Port William. His worldview was shaped by a sense of continuity and connection to the land. Berry viewed humanity's role as small and enabled within a grander universe.
Berry also expressed complex views on history and its controversies. He considered Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee a "tragic figure" rather than solely an upholder of slavery. This stance, along with his defense of a controversial fresco at the University of Kentucky that depicted aspects of Lexington history, led to clashes. Berry and his wife filed a lawsuit in 2020 objecting to the fresco's removal.
For decades, Berry and his wife operated a hillside organic farm in Henry County, eschewing computers, television, and phones, though they installed solar units in 2005. He had previously severed ties with the University of Kentucky after it accepted a significant donation for a new dormitory from donors organized by a coal company president. In 2011, he participated in a sit-in protesting strip-mining.
Born in Henry County in 1934, Berry graduated from the Millersburg Military Institute and attended the University of Kentucky, where he encountered agrarian publications and writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. After spending time away, including a fellowship at Stanford University and a period in New York, he purchased Lanes Landing and settled there by the late 1960s.
Berry was inspired by Kentucky's natural resources and the continuity of its landscape, finding a sense of order and place in nature that contrasted with human endeavors.