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Poet, novelist and essayist Wendell Berry, whose prophetic warnings about nature and the contemporary world from his Henry County farmhouse reached millions of readers across the world, died Monday, the New York Times reported. He was 92.
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The New York Times reported that Berry died at his home in Port Royal.
As both an environmental activist and cultural critic, Berry became perhaps the most famous writer to emerge from Kentucky, making his name first with “The Unsettling of America” in 1977, a series of essays about our growing estrangement from the land, followed by “The Gift of Good Land” in 1981.
He wrote more than 40 books, including a series of novels about the people of rural Port William, a thinly disguised Port Royal, and published numerous poetry collections, including “The Peace of Wild Things” from 2012.
American writer and Kentucky native Silas House said in a Facebook post Monday that Berry’s death meant there was “another great light gone out.”
“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 said. “Generous with his time and words. Complex. Brilliant. Revolutionary.”
Henry County roots
Berry grew up as part of a multigenerational clan whose roots in Henry County went back five generations. His father, John M. Berry, created the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-Op, which created price parities that allowed small farmers to profit from their crops starting in 1941. That model, which lasted until 2004, provided Berry a model of cooperative, small farming that rebuked big agribusiness for decades as farmers stayed on their land.
Berry received a bachelors and masters degree in English from the University of Kentucky, where he met Tanya Amyx, whom he married in 1957. The next year, he was accepted into Stanford University’s creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He worked with such writers as Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey and fellow Kentuckian Ed McClanahan, who became along with writer Gurney Norman, a lifelong friend. Berry was part of what became known as Kentucky’s literary Fab Five, with Norman, McClanahan, James Baker Hall and Bobbie Ann Mason, who is now the last living member.
In 1965, Berry and his family bought a farm known as Lane’s Landing back in Henry County, which became his home and inspiration for his work. He soon began sending out a stream of essays, poems and novels, including “The Hidden Wound,” his examination of U.S. race relations. He also produced “What are People For?” and “Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings about Love, Compassion & Forgiveness.”
His embrace of all things rural included a rejection of modern technologies such as computers and cell phones, famously writing on a typewriter, and corresponding with hand-written letters and an occasional landline phone call.
He was an early standard-bearer for the environmental activists facing the imminent threats of climate change today. In “The Long Legged House,” published in 1969, he wrote:
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“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”
In his work and in person, Berry protested the Vietnam War, factory farming and urbanization. In 2009, he took his papers away from the University of Kentucky after they built the “Wildcat Coal Lodge” for basketball players, saying “I don’t think the University of Kentucky can be so ostentatiously friendly to the coal industry … and still be a friend to me and the interests for which I have stood for the last 45 years.” He gave them to the Kentucky Historical Society.
In 2011, he spent the night in the governor’s office of the Kentucky Capitol as part of a sit-in protest against mountaintop removal.
That same year, Berry received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
His daughter, Mary Berry, and other family members established the Berry Center in New Castle, “for the purpose of bringing focus, knowledge and cohesiveness to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agriculture system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities.”
In 2020, Berry, and his wife Tanya sued UK to prevent it from removing a mural of 1930s Lexington by Ann Rice O’Hanlon, a relative of Tanya Berry. Students had described the mural as racially offensive, but Berry said the decision dishonored “honest thought.” The mural was commissioned in the 1930s and was done by Ann Rice O’Hanlon, a relative of Tanya Amyx Berry.
Most recently, he tried to stop the establishment of a large bourbon distillery near his farm. As he said in a statement to Henry County Planning Commission, he opposed the desecration of farmland needed to feed people.
“And now the people of Henry County are asked to give up 1,200 acres of good farmland — which would be needed now, if we were feeding the nearby cities, as we should be. It will certainly be needed in the future. And we are asked to sacrifice this land to the interest of tourism and whiskey, which are not needed, but are luxuries dependent on a wasteful and threatened affluence.”
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