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Wendell Berry, the prolific novelist and agrarian activist who helped inspire the farm-to-table and modern American food movement, has died. He was 92.
The Kentucky-bred author died on Monday, Aug. 31, at his home in Port Royal, Berry’s daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed to The New York Times. A cause of death was not disclosed.
Berry’s publisher, Counterpoint Press, confirmed the author’s death to USA TODAY on Tuesday, Sept. 1.
Fellow Kentucky writer Silas House also shared the news of Berry’s death. “Another great light gone out,” House wrote in a Facebook post.
“There are so many ways he influenced me but most of all what I keep thinking is that he was so good to me,” House added. “Generous with his time and words. Complex. Brilliant. Revolutionary.”
Berry wrote poetry, fiction and essays but was probably best known for the 1977 nonfiction book “The Unsettling of America,” a polemic against industrial agriculture that advocated for a more responsible way of farming, with an aim of preserving land, culture and rural communities.
He believed in a life rooted in nature and place and turned a skeptical eye toward modern technology. In a 1987 essay in Harper’s, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” he said, “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.”
Berry condemned all forms of violence – “of land, communities and human beings,” said Michael Pollan, author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”
Journalist Hope Reese wrote that Berry served as a “moral beacon to Americans for half a century, warning of the dangers of consumerism, industrial agriculture and the dissolution of rural communities.”
For more than six decades, he and his wife, Tanya, farmed a 125-acre homestead in Henry County’s Port Royal, just a few miles from where his family had farmed for at least five generations.
His connection to home and place were profound. He set a series of 12 novels written from 1960 to 2022 in the semi-fictionalized “Port William.”
And he lamented that for many Americans, home was just the place where you slept and watched TV. He said he had stopped asking people “where are you from” because so many answered they are from everywhere or nowhere.
From his “sliver of vanishing America,” New Yorker writer Dorothy Wickenden wrote in 2022, Berry “cultivates the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion,” championing sustainable agriculture in a country fueled by industrial behemoths while striving to ensure that rural Americans – “a mocked, despised and ever-dwindling minority – do not perish altogether.”
In 2020, Berry joined a lawsuit to stop the University of Kentucky from removing a controversial wall mural – a 1934 fresco that some students thought idealized slavery. Berry contended the artwork, crafted in a public art program during the New Deal by Tanya’s maternal aunt Ann Rice O’Hanlon, showed how Black people were central in building the region.
Wendell Berry receives presidential honor, meets British royalty
To many, Berry was an icon and a hero.
In 2010, then-President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal. In 2015, he was the first living writer inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. In May of that year, a box set of his work was published by the Library of America, making him one of only two living writers at that time to have received the honor.
Oscar-winning actor Robert Redford coproduced a documentary feature film, 2007’s “The Unforeseen,” based on one of his poems.
Berry may have been more appreciated outside his native Kentucky than in it. When King Charles III visited the state in 2015 and spoke at the Cathedral of the Assumption about preserving the Earth, Berry introduced the British royal.
Berry likened farming to writing a novel.
“The integration of the various animals and crops into a relatively small acreage becomes a formal problem that is just as interesting and just as demanding as the arrangement of the parts of a novel,” he told New Yorker writer Amanda Petrusich in 2019.
“You’ve got to decide what comes first, and then you work your way to the revelation of what comes last. But the parts also have to be ordered. And if they’re ordered properly on a farm, something even more miraculous than most art happens: you have sustainability. Each thing supports the whole thing.”
Wendell Berry embraced farm life
Wendell Erdman Berry was born on Aug. 5, 1934, the first of four children of Virginia Erdman Berry and John Marshall Berry.
He grew up in New Castle, Kentucky, and lived there until his parents sent him 80 miles east to the now-defunct Millersburg Military Institute. “The highest aim of the school was to produce a perfectly obedient, militarist, puritanical moron who could play football,” Berry wrote in “The Long-Legged House.”
Later, at the University of Kentucky, he earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in English and met Tanya Amyx, a fellow student and the free-spirited daughter of an art professor and a textile artist. They had two children: a daughter, Mary, and a son, Den. Mary is the executive director of The Berry Center, a nonprofit that educates local communities about sustainable agriculture.
Berry later moved on to Stanford University, where he studied under famed novelist Wallace Stegner in a star-studded class that included Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ernest J. Gaines and Ken Kesey.
Berry descended from slaveholders on both sides of his family, but as he wrote in 2022’s “The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice,” he and Gaines had a “shared sense of origin” in the “talk of old people” and our “loyalty to the places and communities that nurtured us.”
Berry and his wife spent two years in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he taught at New York University, before they answered the call of home, packing everything they owned in a Volkswagen Beetle and returning to Kentucky, where in 1965 they bought a farm at Lane’s Landing and began growing corn and small grains.
The couple kept it small intentionally. Berry wrote that an Amish friend had told him “a man oughtn’t to milk but about 25 cows because if he keeps to that number, he’ll see them every day. If he milks more than that, he’ll do the work but never see the cows!”
Wendell Berry’s literary legacy includes ‘Peace of Wild Things’ poems
Berry published his first novel in 1960 and first poetry volume in 1964 and wrote out of a crude camp house with no plumbing or electricity. He said that allowed him to avoid distractions. He would write his first drafts by hand, then Tanya would type them on a Royal Standard typewriter she bought in 1956.
“I work alone but always with her presence in my mind,” he once said. “And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high.”
At first, Berry’s poems won him more attention than his prose. The Poetry Foundation said his verse celebrated “the holiness of life and everyday miracles often taken for granted.”
In “The Peace of Wild Things,” he wrote: “When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be / I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. / I come into the peace of wild things… I rest in the grace of the world and am free.”
In the self-deprecating “A Warning to My Readers,” he wrote: “Do not think me gentle / because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any / gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times is not natural. A wonder is what it is.”
His novels could be melancholic but at the same time uplifting, as in “Jayber Crow,” which tells the story of a young man who abandons his plans to become a minister and instead becomes Port William’s town barber.
Wendell Berry railed against big business, defended environmental rights
Berry’s essays often stuck an angrier tone, as in one on corporations, which he described as “a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
“The limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person,” he said. “It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.”
He matched his words with action.
In 1967, he helped lead the Sierra Club’s successful effort to block the Red River Gorge Dam in east-central Kentucky. The dam would have flooded a large swath of the canyon system, which today is one of Kentucky’s most beloved natural areas.
The following year, he joined in anti-war protests at the University of Kentucky. “How many deaths of other people’s children are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent and (supposedly) at peace?” he said in one speech. “To that question I answer: None … Don’t kill any children for my benefit.”
In 1979, Berry participated in non-violent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Marble Hill, Indiana.
Opposing the use of coal as energy source, in 2009, he joined over 2,000 demonstrators in non-violently blocking the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C. He later joined another protest to block the construction of a coal-burning power plant in Clark County, Kentucky.
That same year, he withdrew personal papers he had donated to the University of Kentucky and ended his relationship with his alma mater in protest of its decision to name a dormitory for basketball players “Wildcat Coal Lodge” (a move made in exchange for millions of dollars in donations from the industry).
And in 2011, joined by 14 other protesters, Berry spent a weekend locked in the Kentucky governor’s office demanding an end to mountaintop removal coal mining.
Wendell Berry on influence of religion
People of faith often embraced his work, and preachers sometimes cited it in sermons. Berry said he went to church in “bad weather.”
He was technically a member of New Castle Baptist Church, where he was baptized, and sometimes worshiped with Tanya at Port Royal Baptist Church. “I go up there, and that place is full of ghosts for me,” he said. “I can look at those pews and see my grandfather and his friends and others who are dear and close to me still.”
He has said he tried to get along without religion but found “you can’t not be interested in the church and live out here. It’s an influence.” He also needed it for himself.
“There’s a life that you are not going to be able to prescribe that finally you’re not in charge of,” he said.