Berry, Wendell

Wendell Berry (1934–) is an American writer and farmer whose work is steeped in the South, rural America, and the world of agriculture. His publications and awards span the three major modes of literature—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The grounding of his work in agrarian themes and a strongly developed sense of place and community, as well as his focus on the fictional Kentucky town of Port William, have invited comparisons to William Faulkner.

The oldest of the four children of lawyer John Berry and his wife Virginia—tobacco farmers who came from families that have farmed Henry County, Kentucky, for five generations—Berry attended the University of Kentucky, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in English, completing his master's in 1957. He married Tanya Amyx that same year and enrolled in the creative writing program at Stanford University, where he studied under Wallace Stegner in a seminar that included a future “who's who” of American literary talent: Edward Abbey (The Monkey Wrench Gang), Nobel winner Ernest J. Gaines (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman), Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Pulitzer winner Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), Tillie Olsen (Tell Me A Riddle), and Robert Stone (Dog Soldiers). Berry's first novel, Nathan Coulter, followed in 1960, and after some travel to Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship and a brief stint at New York University, he took a position as professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky, where he taught from 1964 to 1977, and again from 1987 to 1993.

Shortly after taking the University of Kentucky job, Berry and his family moved to Lane's Landing, a farm on the banks of the Kentucky River just outside Port Royal, Kentucky, near the birthplaces of both his parents. The farm has expanded to 125 acres, where Berry grows corn, grain, and tobacco.

Berry has published 11 volumes of fiction (novels and short story collections), 16 of nonfiction, and 25 of poetry. His nonfiction makes explicit the ideas that are “behind the scenes” in much of his other work. Berry prizes an informed agricultural/rural life, in which people are well connected to the community that surrounds them and to nature and the interconnectedness of life, the economy is primarily locally driven, agriculture is sustainable, food is fresh and good, and work is done well and responsibly. In essence, Berry prizes the yeoman farmer who represented the ideal American for the agrarians of the 18th and 19th centuries. Opposed to this life are threats to the environment, both locally and globally; [Page 46]large-scale industrial farming and corporate agribusinesses; greed and ignorance and indifference; a lack of respect for life and nature and others; and the increasing globalist focus of economics. Many of his essays, even when addressing contemporary concerns that are now 30 or 40 years old, evince a general philosophy that is applicable beyond that timely context.

One of Berry's most significant and influential works of nonfiction is 1977's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, which in Berry's words “describes and opposes the abuses of farmland and farming people,” and by extension the abuse and deterioration of America's agrarian, yeoman heritage. The book discusses the loss of farmland to urban and suburban development, the rise of agribusinesses (which then operated nationally and now have globalized—something Berry strongly opposes), the disastrous rate of soil erosion and the rampant problems of soil and water pollution, and in general, the losing battle fought by agrarianism against industrialism. In a follow-up essay, “The Agrarian Standard,” written 25 years later (and pointing out that the conditions described in Unsettling grew worse in the interim), Berry describes his role as an agrarian writer as “writing essays and speeches that one would prefer not to write, that one wishes would prove unnecessary, that one hopes nobody will have any need for in twenty-five years … but I have never doubted for a minute the importance of the hope I have tried to serve: the hope that we might become a healthy people in a healthy land.”

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