Famed Kentucky novelist and poet Wendell Berry dies at 92

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian who in poems, stories, novels and essays celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned of the excesses and misjudgments of an industrial, commercialised society, has died. He was 92. 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.

Berry was a prolific writer who published more than 40 books, including the novels “Nathan Coulter” and “A Place on Earth,” 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.”

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.

The tall, slender Berry imagined, chronicled and lived out his vision of a self-sustaining community in which no one had to ask where their food came from or the names of their neighbors. In the classic farming manifesto “The Unsettling of America,” published in 1977, he attacked the consolidation and mechanisation of agriculture as a violation of the natural order, whether of the land or of the spirit.

His disdain for modernity touched upon virtually every aspect of life, from dancing to weather forecasts to birth control, opinions he well knew were not universally shared. Reviewing a Library of America anthology of his nonfiction, The New York Times’ Dwight Garner wrote 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.”

Most of his fiction, closely based on his childhood, was set in rural Port William and populated with such characters as drunken Uncle Peach, the drowned Chicken Little, the wise and patient farm hand Dick Watson and Andy Catlett, Berry’s alter ego, a boy “inclined to be dreamy” and “slide right out of the present world.”

His worldview was shaped by an ancient sense of continuity and connection, like in the story “Watch with Me,” when a troubled man known as “Nightlife” picks up an old shotgun and disappears into the woods. A local posse follows, led by the farmer Tol Proudfoot, who worries Nightlife might kill himself or harm others. The pursuit is long and exhausting.

History led to some controversial opinions - Berry would regard the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as more “a tragic figure” than an upholder of slavery - and a clash among Berry, the University of Kentucky and some of its students. Berry’s wife Tanya was the niece of artist Ann Rice O’Hanlon, whose Great Depression era fresco about Lexington history has long been controversial for its alleged sanitizing of slavery. Wendell and Tanya Berry filed a lawsuit in 2020 that objected to its removal from the school. Three years earlier, he had defended the fresco as a painful, but realistic portrait.

Berry was born in Henry County in 1934, and he moved with his family soon after to New Castle, where his father practiced 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.

Associated Press