Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels, and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky. He was 92.
His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed the death.
Lanky and rawboned in middle age, with melancholy eyes, a jutting chin, and a widow’s peak reminiscent of Lincoln’s, Wendell Berry wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction, and argument that championed small family farms, the environment, local foods, and interdependent communities, and railed against chemicals, most technologies, agribusiness, and distant government.
“The national economy that is really run for the benefit of a very few people is preying upon and slowly destroying local communities everywhere,” Mr. Berry told Sierra magazine in 1990. “Everything we produce in rural America makes more money for other people than it does for those who produce it. We’re destroying rural America.”
Mr. Berry was once hailed by author and historian Page Smith as “a prophetic American voice of our day.” He never became a household name but, as his oeuvre grew over a half-century, advocates of agrarian and ecological causes embraced his work as an eloquent, if sometimes didactic, expression of their own hopes. Some critics likened his landed exhortations to those of Henry David Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson.
Toward the end of his long fight for agrarian justice, waged from a cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky, Mr. Berry was showered with honors, including the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest award for humanitarian services, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House in 2011, “for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer, and conservationist.”
Raised on a farm in north-central Kentucky, he studied English at the University of Kentucky and writing at Stanford with the environmentalist-novelist Wallace Stegner, traveled in Italy, and landed in New York, intending to write and teach. He married, had two children, and taught for two years at New York University.
But at 30, he confronted in himself a deep need to return to his roots — specifically, to an old two-room cabin on the Kentucky River at Port Royal, in Henry County, where his ancestors had lived since 1803. The cabin had been built in the 1920s by a great-uncle. He had known the place all his life; indeed, had visited it often as a boy and spent a summer there with his wife, Tanya.
“In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted — and it was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige,” he recalled in an essay titled for its inspirational setting, “The Long-Legged House.”
In 1964, the couple resolved to stay and work the land. Nearby, they bought a 125-acre farm, called Lanes Landing, and started raising sheep, corn, and grain crops, and planted gardens for their own table. Mr. Berry also initiated a 20-year teaching association at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington.
Returning to his home as a place to write for the rest of his life was a way to insure, to himself, that he would always be bound by the truth, Mr. Berry said in a phone interview in 2018 for this obituary.
“It made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape,” he said. “The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”
He rebuilt the Long-Legged House and began writing there about sustainable agriculture and the culture of life on small farms and in farming towns — polemics about how such places were vital to individual liberties and why they were rapidly disappearing from a landscape increasingly afflicted with topsoil erosion, polluted water, and toxic chemicals.
Over the next half-century, he wrote with a pencil or pen on paper during daylight hours. His farmhouse had electricity, but he refused to use electric lights at the Long-Legged House, where he wrote, because, he said, the power was supplied by strip-mined coal. His wife critiqued his work and typed his manuscripts on an old Royal standard. He refused to have a television set, or a computer after they came along.
Mr. Berry first won national attention with The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977), a manifesto to save small farms from big business and a government bent on agricultural efficiencies that, he said, were destroying the land and a way of life. The book launched the modern movement for sustainable farming and became a conservationist classic.
“The concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands — with the consequent increase in overhead, debt, and dependence on machines — is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance,” Mr. Berry wrote.
In a review for the New York Times, farmer-poet Donald Hall hailed its “worldview that derives its premises from the experience of working on the land.” Its author, Hall added, “argues with careful logic for the recovery of lost land, for the return of the small farmer to the countryside, the small farmer expropriated by the army of agribusiness.”
Mr. Berry elaborated on this theme in The Gift of Good Land (1981) and Home Economics (1987), essay collections that described organic farming techniques in America and abroad. They argued that “industrial values” were killing family farms and threatening American society as a whole.
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Marshaling fiction to his cause, Mr. Berry wrote more than a dozen novels and volumes of short stories. He invented a Kentucky town, Port William, as a setting for generations of lives interwoven in tales of murder, alcoholism, marital discord, and remembrance against subtexts of fading agrarian life. Some critics called his fiction moralistic and short on plot and character development.
Others found his novels moving. The Memory of Old Jack (1974), the recollections of a 92-year-old farmer on his last day of life, was “magnificent,” English scholar Joan Joffe Hall wrote in the New Republic, saying it “makes us grieve that these rhythms of work and speech are lost to us.”
As a poet, Mr. Berry produced some 30 volumes of collected verses, starting with The Broken Ground (1964). His “Sparrow,” in its entirety, was typically economical:
A sparrow is
his hunger organized.
Filled, he flies
before he knows he’s going to,
And he dies by the
same movement filled
with himself, he goes
by the eye-quick
reflex of his flesh
out of sight,
leaving his perfect
absence without a thought.
“The quiet but sure and melodious voice of Wendell Berry makes The Broken Ground an immediate pleasure,” poet and critic Robert Pack wrote in a review for the Times. “He is essentially elegiac, ranging from praise to requiem; throughout his poems there broods a reverential hush.”
Farmers caught in an economic squeeze regarded Mr. Berry’s ideas as naive. So did Charles Barnhart, a dean at the University of Kentucky’s college of agriculture.
“What Wendell is talking about is a primitive agriculture,” Barnhart told the Times in 1988. “It’s a nice way of life if you have a rich father and you’re a tenured member of the faculty at a university. But I don’t see a great proportion of the American public returning to farms. And I don’t see it as an industry that would ever be capable of feeding 225 million people.”
Still, Mr. Berry won a wide following. “It’s a movement on the way up, and Wendell’s influence in it is pervasive,” Ron Kroese, director of the Land Stewardship Project in Stillwater, Minn., told the Times in 1988. “Wendell Berry has been the contemporary conscience of American agriculture.”
Wendell Erdman Berry was born in Louisville, Ky., on Aug. 5, 1934, the first of four children of John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer in Port Royal, and Virginia (Erdman) Berry. The families of both parents had farmed in the county for more than five generations.
Like his siblings — John Jr., Mary Jo, and Martha — Wendell Berry helped work the farm. He learned from a grandfather how to harness and drive a team of mules. He was a melancholy boy. But in childhood retreats to the Long-Legged House, he found peace and solitude and read Walden, Thoreau’s reflections on two years in a woodland cabin in Concord, Mass.
A rebellious teenager, Mr. Berry was sent to Millersburg Military Institute, a boarding school near Lexington. He hated it. “The highest aim,” he recalled, “was to produce a perfectly obedient, militarist, puritanical moron who could play football.”
At the University of Kentucky, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 and a master’s in 1957.
Mr. Berry and Tanya Amyx were married in 1957. In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Pryor Berry, known as “Den”; two sisters, Mary Jo Berry and Martha Baxter; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In recent years, still living and writing in Port Royal, Wendell Berry also joined nonviolent protests against mountaintop-removal coal mining, coal-fired power plants, and the death penalty.
Besides the humanities medal, Mr. Berry received more than 30 awards, including the Sewanee Review’s Allen Tate Poetry Prize in 2014 and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle in 2016. He was the subject of a 2016 documentary, Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, directed by Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell.
“His writing has sometimes been called radical, but he thinks of himself as a conservative, conserving what is most human in our landscapes and ourselves,” journalist and artist Paul Trachtman wrote in a 2005 Smithsonian magazine profile of Mr. Berry.
“You know,” the story quoted Mr. Berry as saying, “if you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn’t be very much left.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
