Wendell Berry

IDENTIFICATION: American author of books on conservation and agrarianism

Berry's integrated professions of farmer, writer, and critic of industrial development placed him among the major figures of the twentieth century in both conservation and literature.

Born on August 5, 1934, to a tobacco farm family during the Great Depression, Wendell Berry grew up in a simple environment of small farms that practiced crop diversification, organic fertilizing, and use of draft animals. Berry's family had deep roots in the community, as did their neighbors. Farmers in Henry County, Kentucky, were largely self-sufficient, depending little on resources beyond their region.

Berry's rural upbringing affected every facet of his adult life. After receiving bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Kentucky at Lexington, he was awarded a prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University in 1958. This opportunity moved Berry into a circle of scholars and writers, notably Wallace Stegner, who at that time was a prominent novelist and conservationist. In 1960 Berry returned to Henry County. He spent a brief time in France and Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship and later held teaching positions at New York University, Georgetown College, the University of Cincinnati, Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, and Stanford University. He lived most of his life with his wife Tanya Amyx Berry (they married in 1957) in his native north central Kentucky, where the couple farmed. He was an English professor at the University of Kentucky from 1964 to 1977 and from 1987 to 1993.

In addition to farming and teaching, Berry became an award-winning writer of more than forty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He is considered by many to be one of the most important nature poets of his generation. He gained widespread recognition for his early volumes The Broken Ground (1964) and Openings (1968), both of which center on rural themes. Much of his best-known early poetry was collected in the volume Collected Poems, 1957–1982 (1985). He continued to explore rural concepts in later works such as Given (2005), The Mad Farmer Poems (2008), and Leavings (2009).

Berry's writing on environmental issues focuses mainly on agriculture and the simple life. Many of his most successful novels are set in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and deal with the concerns of the farmers there. These include his semi-autobiographical novelistic debut, Nathan Coulter (1960); The Memory of Old Jack (1974), in which a ninety-two-year-old farmer relives his simple, agrarian life in flashbacks; and Hannah Coulter (2004). Critics note how such works reflect a longing to return to a pre–World War II life of rural self-sufficiency.

Berry explored environmental concerns in nonfiction as well, both long and short form. Among his best-known nonfiction works are The Long-Legged House (1969), The Hidden Wound (1970), A Continuous Harmony (1972), The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), and The Gift of Good Land (1981). In later essays such as those found in Citizenship Papers (2003) and Our Only World: Ten Essays (2015), he examines the environmental, sociological, and political consequences of global industrialism. The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings (2017) continued his signature style across essays, stories, and poems, showcasing his versatility as a writer.

As a whole, Berry's writings emphasize the connectedness of human beings with the rest of nature. He is critical of the destruction of the land by mechanized monoculture farming, use of pesticides and fertilizers, clear-cutting of forests, and strip mining. He decries the movement away from the family farm to corporate farming, asserting that the corporate sector has killed rural America.

Berry's work views farming as an art and prioritizes ecology over economics, which values efficiency and specialization as means of maximizing income in the short term. In his view, technology has dehumanized agriculture by replacing the self-fulfilling labor of farmers and their families. In addition, technology has driven people from their land into the cities, generating social and environmental problems in urban areas. Berry believed that a return to sustainable agriculture is an ecological imperative for maintaining a high quality of life. He participated directly in rallies and protests for environmental causes. such as opposition to the coal industry.

Berry is also known for incorporating spiritual themes in his works, with roots particularly in Christian traditions. Often these spiritual elements are deeply connected to environmentalism and conservationism. In his writings he praises the Amish for their stewardship of the land and their farming on a scale appropriate to the needs of their communities. He likewise admonishes Christians to heed the biblical message that "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof."

Across his long and productive career Berry received numerous awards and honors, becoming regarded as a major cultural figures of his day. Indeed, his unique body of work transcended the literary community and saw him earn recognition in fields such as social justice, environmental awareness, and religion. He earned grants or fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others. He won the Sewanee Review's Aitken-Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry (1994), the T. S. Eliot Award from the Ingersoll Foundation (1994), the John Hay Award (1997), the Lyndhurst Prize (1997), the National Humanities Medal (2010), the Roosevelt Institution's Freedom Medal, the Allen Tate Poetry Prize (2014), and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Books Critics Circle (2016), among many other awards. The Berry Center was established in his name in 2011 to work toward sustainable, practical farming.

In 2020, Berry became involved in a legal controversy when the University of Kentucky voted to remove a campus mural featuring scenes from the state’s history. The mural was painted in the 1930s and included images of enslaved African Americans, recounting the time when Kentucky was a slave state. When the school announced the mural would be removed, a process that would have entailed destroying the entire wall it was painted on, Berry and his wife filed a lawsuit to stop the school from removing the work. Although Berry’s lawsuit was eventually dismissed in 2024, the judge in the case ruled that the mural should remain, as the images in the painting simply illustrated Kentucky’s history and did not glorify slavery.

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Ed. Norman Wirzba. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002.

Bonzo, J. Matthew, and Michael R. Stevens. Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008.

"A Kentucky Judge Dismisses Lawsuit but Protects Historic Mural That Has Sparked Protests." Associated Press, 20 Mar. 2024, apnews.com/article/university-kentucky-mural-lawsuit-ann-rice-ohanlon-6f468bb5f5b968350b35ee7a20346acf. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Peters, Jason. Wendell Berry: Life and Work. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010

Smith, Kimberly K. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

"Wendell Berry." Poetry Foundation, 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wendell-berry. Accessed 12 July 2024.

"Wendell Berry." Poets.org, American Academy of Poets, 2024, poets.org/poet/wendell-berry. Accessed 12 July 2024.