Wendell Berry, 1934-2026

Almost every American who has ever stood in a supermarket aisle and felt an unease about how food arrives there already knows Wendell Berry, even if they have never opened one of his books. His saying “eating is an agricultural act” sounded like common sense until you noticed how much of modern life had been arranged to make you forget it.Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer who spent six decades insisting that culture and agriculture were the same word split by an accident of spelling, died on Aug. 31 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. Wendell Erdman Berry was born in Louisville on Aug. 5, 1934, and grew up in Henry County, where his family had farmed since the early 19th century. After an education that left him suspicious of institutionalized power, he earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky. In 1958 he won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, in a workshop that included Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry. A Guggenheim year in Italy and France followed, then a teaching post at New York University. Friends warned that leaving Manhattan for a Kentucky hillside would be literary suicide. In 1964 he left anyway, bought a neglected farm along the Kentucky River, and moved there with his family the following year. Recommended Stories He farmed, for the most part, with horses. He wrote, for the most part, in pencil, in a riverside cabin without electric light, and declined both television and the computer. Tanya Amyx, whom he married in 1957, typed the manuscripts and served as his first editor. He reached a national audience in 1977 with The Unsettling of America, a fierce brief against industrial agriculture and the official creed that farms should “adapt or die.” Berry’s counterclaim was older than the Department of Agriculture: A culture that treats land as a factory and neighbors as optional will eventually treat people the same way. The book helped midwife the language of local food that later writers such as Michael Pollan would carry into the mainstream. Meanwhile Berry kept building the fictional town of Port William (modeled after Port Royal) so vividly that readers could almost smell the river. Author Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (Ed Reinke,/AP) It was as a poet that his voice became unmistakable. From The Broken Ground (1964) through the sequence gathered in This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, he wrote as a man who had walked out of town on Sunday morning and into the woods. Solitude in nature in these poems is a Thoreauvian practice. The speaker wanders along creeks and ridgelines, communing with the spirit of the place in ways that recall the classical idea of the genius loci. In Berry’s poetry, land and farmer live in a mutual economy of gift and limit.The religious music in his poetry is quiet but distinct, like the chimes of a harp. Several Sabbath lyrics move with the beat of the Beatitudes: blessed are the limited, the local, the ones who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. Elsewhere Berry writes that “the incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.” Creation is the language in which the Word keeps talking. Critics have heard Milton in the darker registers of Berry’s poetry, especially when the poems turn to the subject of machines. Like William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution (a phrase that Blake invented, fittingly, in his poem on Milton), Berry called the machines of today’s technological revolution “mind-destroying mechanical dreams.” Berry penned this phrase long before the dawn of ChatGPT, but it’s hard to think of a more apt description for artificial intelligence than these four ominous words.Berry accepted a litany of honors, from a National Humanities Medal to a lifetime award from the National Book Critics Circle, but never accepted a place in the world of the literati that went along with it. Like an alternate Thoreau who never left Walden, Berry never left the woods.DOLLY PARTON, 1946-2026 Berry was sometimes called a crank, which is what a settled age calls a man who notices that its conveniences are eating the ground. He was also funny in the dry way of someone who has watched a lot of weather. He can be described as a religious writer, but (like Emerson) an unconventional and nature-centric one: “If I’m a theologian,” he wrote, “I am one to the extent I have learned to duck / when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead, / dropping their loads of whitewash at random / on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.”He left more than 50 books and a farm that outlasted the advice to get big or get out. In an era busy congratulating itself on intelligence that no longer requires a person, one of his Sabbath poems still reads like a weather report that arrived early: “When we cease from human thought, / a low and effective cunning / stirs in the most inhuman minds.” Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.