Wendell Berry, Voice for Land and Neighbor, Dies at 92

Wendell Berry, farmer, author, and activist died earlier this week. He was 92 years old.

Berry’s death was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by a statement sent to Sojourners by The Berry Center where his daughter, Mary Berry, serves as executive director.

“The Berry Center and Berry family are heartbroken to announce the death of Wendell Erdman Berry, writer and farmer of Port Royal, Henry County, Kentucky. He passed suddenly and peacefully at home yesterday afternoon, August 31st,” the statement read. “His work continues, here and in every place where people aim to live according to nature’s measure, on and with and of their beloved home place.”

Berry was a tireless advocate for rural communities, farming, the natural world, and dissent from economies that prioritized productivity over harmony with land and neighbor. He lived in Kentucky, farming about 125 acres with his wife, Tanya. Berry wrote novels, poems, and essays, first by pencil and then typewritten by Tanya. He published over 50 works. In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal.

“A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this,” he wrote in an essay on local culture. “Once we have acknowledged this principle, we can only be alarmed at the extent to which it has been ignored. For although our present society does generate a centripetal force of great power, this is not a local force, but one centered almost exclusively in our great commercial and industrial cities, which have drawn irresistibly into themselves both the products of the countryside and the people and talents of the country communities.”

Berry was born in Kentucky, his father was a farmer and a lawyer, which gave Berry his “father’s passion for farming and also his commitment to doing something for the small farmers,” he said in 2012. He graduated from the University of Kentucky before entering a creative writing program at Stanford. He spent a year in Tuscany for a Guggenheim fellowship before teaching at NYU for two years.

In 1964, Berry took a job at the University of Kentucky. His friends all “thought the direction from New York to Kentucky was inevitably backward and downward,” he said, adding that there was “no lofty purpose” to the move besides coming home.

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In 1977, Berry published The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, a book that established him as a significant figure in American writing and introduced readers to many of the local, agrarian, and environmental themes that would define his career. The Unsettling of America is a work of nonfiction, but Berry would continue to explore his convictions in poems, essays, and novels over the course of his lengthy career.

Widely shared poems such as “The Peace of Wild Things” and “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” helped cement his budding reputation, while later fictional works like Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter made him a literary star.

Over his career, Berry would influence the lives of numerous poets, theologians, writers, and activists. His work and its critique of the modern economy’s influence on daily life were read widely, as likely to be cited in Sojourners as First Things and Front Porch Republic.

The author Barbara Brown Taylor told Sojourners that Berry was the first person to give her permission to keep Sabbath in the woods, “and I will never stop being grateful to him for it.”

“Once, when I was teaching graduate students in a doctor of ministry program, they initially rebelled when I sent them outside to go read one of Wendell’s poems to a tree,” Taylor wrote to Sojourners in an email. “When they came back to the classroom, the rebellion was over.”

READ MORE: Tilling Word and Land

Ellen F. Davis, professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke University, told Sojourners that Berry “has been our most consistent public witness to the hope and conviction that there is another way of being in the world, an alternative to the deadly juggernaut of industrialization.”

On Sept. 10, Davis is scheduled to present the third annual Wendell Berry lecture hosted by the Berry Center.

“With warmth, incisive humor, and utter seriousness, he has consistently provided us with the will and the language to cast a realistic vision of holiness in this century, in all our places,” she told Sojourners.

Laura Dunn, a filmmaker, first met Berry when she asked if he would read his poem “Sabbath III (Santa Clara Valley)” for the documentary The Unforeseen. As she toured the film, she was struck by how few people knew the voice or the poet behind it. Wanting to draw more attention to Berry’s work, she began writing letters back and forth with Berry in hopes of producing a documentary about his life.

“He didn’t want a film about him. He didn’t want to be on screen. He didn’t want to be made an idol of,” Dunn said. “It was really through my friendship with his wife, Tanya, that the film [Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry] came about.”

The time with Berry only further convinced Dunn of his brilliance, not just on page.

“He’s the kind of person you ask a question to and the way he answers it makes you rethink your question and why you asked it that way,” she said.

Dunn said he was incredibly gracious and generous with others, even those interrupting him from his work. She recalled his deep emotion and adamant positivity.

“Even though he was very grieved by the world as it was, he really held out a hope,” she said.

Kentucky native Crystal Wilkinson, award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, said that she was a “woman of the land” far before she knew Berry’s work, having grown up on her grandfather’s farm. But Berry’s writing gave Wilkinson “permission to write about the land and Agrarian life and culture.”

“Wendell's work and our conversations made me think more deeply about the rhythm of farm life and how time works in rural life and how that appears in rural people,” Wilkinson wrote in an email. “His experiences and memories and desires in regard to landscape show up on the page. He taught me that the rhythm and pace of my writing is not something that I need to find outside myself but it's already there in the land, in the working of the land, and in the people.”

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Pádraig Ó Tuama, a poet and theologian, noted in an email to Sojourners that in “Wendell Berry’s poetry, the earth is a speaker for itself.”

“It does not fit neatly into ‘sacrament’, which could run the risk of rendering it discardable by those who do not recognise its sanctity,” he wrote.

“He was a poet, not a preacher, but I’ve always found his poems work in me,” Ó Tuama said, quoting Berry’s poetry, “as a call both to attention and action, to ‘accept what comes from silence. […] make a poem that does not disturb / the silence from which it came.”

In 2004, Sojourners editor Rose Marie Berger interviewed Berry on his farm in Kentucky. He spoke of the dangers of holy wars and misusing the “conventional language” of Christianity, and he called the gospels “revolutionary” in how they might affect readers under 21st century capitalism.

“If you take seriously those passages in the scripture that say that we live by God’s spirit and his breath, that we live, move, and have our being in God, the implications for the present economy are just devastating,” he said.

Sojourners editors Josina Guess and Tyler Huckabee contributed reporting to this article.

“Even though [Wendell Berry] was very grieved by the world as it was, he really held out a hope.” —Laura Dunn