Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934, Port Royal, Kentucky, U.S.) is an American author whose nature poetry, novels of America’s rural past, and essays on ecological responsibility grew from his experiences as a farmer. His best-known nonfiction work is The Unsettling of America (1977), a defense of farming practices that work in harmony with nature and a polemic against agribusiness and its impact on the land. Berry’s writing has drawn praise for its clear, graceful language and its consistent centering of the importance of agrarian values. In a 1982 article in The Georgia Review, critic Charles Hudson said of Berry, “In an age when many writers have committed themselves to their ‘specialty’—even though doing so can lead to commercialism, preciousness, self-indulgence, social irresponsibility, or even nihilism—Berry has refused to specialize. He is a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a naturalist, and a small farmer. He has embraced the commonplace and has ennobled it.”

Rural Kentucky upbringing

Berry was the eldest of four children born in Kentucky to John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and a tobacco farmer, and Virginia Erdman, a college-educated woman who came from a family of farmers. Berry has described his mother as being a great reader, and he has credited his father with instilling in him the importance of using clear language. In 2019 Berry told The New Yorker, “My father insisted on the use of the right words, on calling things by their right names, and his syntax was powerful. I have a big debt to his language.” Berry’s mother was born in Port Royal, Kentucky, and his father was born about four miles (six km) south of there. Their families had been in the region since the beginning of the 19th century. Berry grew up working on his father’s farm in Newcastle, Kentucky, and on other farms in the area.

Education and teaching career

Berry was educated at a military boarding school in Millersburg, Kentucky, and at the University of Kentucky, Lexington (B.A., 1956; M.A., 1957), where he met fellow student Tanya Amyx. In 1957 he married Amyx, who has played a crucial editorial role in his writing; he and Amyx had two children and several grandchildren.

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After graduating from the University of Kentucky, Berry taught at Stanford University, where he studied as a creative writing fellow under Wallace Stegner, known for his historical fiction set in the American West. Other fellows in the program at Stanford included Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Ernest Gaines, and Edward Abbey, all of whom also published work with a strong regional—and rural—focus. Berry later spent a year in Italy on a Guggenheim fellowship and taught at New York University. In 1964 he returned to the University of Kentucky to teach and settled on a farm near his birthplace. He left the university in 1977 to concentrate on writing and farming.

Return to Kentucky and farming

Berry’s decision to leave New York City, “the literary capital of the universe,” to dedicate himself to small-scale farming in rural Kentucky is important to understanding the themes of his work. In an interview published in Humanities in 2012, Berry said, “I don’t think I had a single literary friend who thought I’d done the right thing by leaving New York and coming back [to Kentucky] to live.…After we moved back here, I understood that my subject was here, and that, wherever I might have gone, I would still have been drawing on this country, because it was what I knew.”

Poetry

Berry’s poetry—from his first collection, The Broken Ground (1964), to later volumes such as Sabbaths (1987)—reveals a steadily growing concern with the abuse of the land and with the need to restore the balance of nature. Many of his poems capture the experiences of a traditional agrarian way of life, absent of modern technology. (Berry famously eschews computers, preferring a pen or pencil and paper to compose his works, and he also does not own a cell phone and many other modern technologies.) His poetry often balances close observations of nature’s processes and a prophetic message of caution or grace, as in “A Vision.”

Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament.

Fiction

The theme of human responsibility to the Earth is also present in Berry’s novels, including The Memory of Old Jack (1974), which consists of the reflections, dating back to the Civil War years, of a 92-year-old rural man. That book was part of a series of various works set in the fictional Kentucky town of Port William, which is loosely modeled on Port Royal. Later novels in the series include Jayber Crow (2000), Hannah Coulter (2004), and Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2007). Berry also published short stories, including the collection Watch with Me: And Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch (1994). In a 2019 interview with The New Yorker, Berry discussed the similarities between writing fiction and working a small farm.

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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. 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.

Nonfiction and activism

Among Berry’s nonfiction prose works, The Hidden Wound (1970) explores racism, while The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977) discusses the late 20th-century crises of culture and morality. The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge (1971) features black-and-white photographs of the Red River Gorge and surrounding area by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The book was published to draw attention to a plan by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dam the gorge to create a recreational lake.

Indeed, Berry’s writing often accompanied his activism to preserve wilderness spaces and to protest other issues such as the Vietnam War. As awareness of environmental concerns increased at the turn of the 20th century, Berry’s writings on agrarian values and the dangers of over-dependence on modern technology came to be seen as prescient. His essays in The Long-Legged House (1969), The Gift of Good Land (1981), Standing by Words (1985), Home Economics (1987), What Are People For? (1990), Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (1993), and Another Turn of the Crank (1995) expand on his themes of ecology and human responsibility. Library of America also published two volumes of his essays in 2019.

Honors

In 2010 Berry received the National Humanities Medal from U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. He was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013 and received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Books Critics’ Circle in 2016. The Berry Center is a nonprofit organization founded in Henry County, Kentucky, in 2011; it educates local farmers and communities about sustainable agriculture and is run by Berry’s children and grandchildren.