Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian whose 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 aged 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.
Berry was a prolific writer who published more than 40 books, including the novels Nathan Coulter and A Place on Earth, the short story collection Stand By Me 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.
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 40 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.”
“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 born in Henry County in 1934, and he moved with his family soon after to New Castle, where his father practised 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.
By his early 20s, he was publishing poems and stories. 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 bought Lanes Landing in Kentucky and settled there.
Berry and his wife 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. He cut ties with the University of Kentucky, his alma mater, after the school accepted $7m 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.
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.
“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.”
