Wendell Berry: A Life Rooted in Land and Literature

President Barack Obama awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal to Wendell E. Berry during a White House ceremony in 2011. Berry, a renowned novelist and poet, spent his life cultivating both his land and his prose. His family farmed in Henry County, Kentucky, for seven generations before him. Berry passed away at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at the age of 92.

Berry’s journey as a writer began in academia. He studied at the University of Kentucky and Stanford University. By age 28, he held a distinguished position as an English professor at New York University. However, city life did not suit him. In his 1968 essay, A Native Hill, Berry expressed his choice to leave the New York literary scene just two years into his career to return to Kentucky. I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life. Berry achieved that hope, dedicating himself to both farming and writing.

The land of Henry County heavily influenced Berry’s work. He was an outspoken critic of industrialized agriculture and skeptical of technology. He avoided computers, opting to handwrite and type his work on a typewriter purchased in 1956 that never needed replacement. Berry’s writings emphasized slowing down and appreciating the environment and people around us, as seen in his 2001 poem June Wind: Light and wind are running Over the headed grass As though the hill had Melted and now flowed.

Berry also addressed political themes in his poems. His 1968 work Against the War in Vietnam remarked on societal impacts: In the name of ourselves we ride at the wheels of our engines, in the name of Plenty devouring all, the exhaust of our progress falling deadly on villages and fields we do not see. We are prepared for millions of little deaths.

In 2012, President Obama recognized Berry’s contributions with the National Humanities Medal, and he became the first living writer to enter the Kentucky Writer’s Hall of Fame in 2015. In a 1998 All Things Considered interview, Berry was reluctant to offer advice to the younger generation. Yet he advised them, if possible, to stop some place, and stay there. Learn the history of it, and the names of the plants and animals and the neighbors.

Berry’s legacy lies in his lessons on slowing down, observing, and deeply appreciating our surroundings.