Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934) is a United States novelist, essayist, philosopher, poet, teacher and farmer. His most well known book, The Unsettling of America, provides a classic critique of industrial agriculture, or agribusiness, as contrasted with agrarianism.

Biography

Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky in 1934, the first of four children born to John and Virginia Berry. His father was a tobacco farmer in Henry County, and least five generations in both his father's and mother's lineage have lived in Henry county as farmers. He attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute, and then pursued a B.A. and a Master's degree in English at the University of Kentucky at Lexington. In 1957 he completed his Master's degree, and married Tanya Amyx. In 1958 Berry received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and attended Stanford University's creative writing program, where he studied with Stegner in a seminar that included Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey. In 1960 he and Tanya returned to the 250-acre (1 km²) Berry family farm to become tobacco farmers.

Berry was granted a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship which took him and his family to Italy and France in 1961. From 1962 to 1964 he taught English at New York University’s University College in the Bronx. In the fall of 1964, he began teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky. In 1977, he resigned from the University of Kentucky. In 1987, he returned to University of Kentucky, teaching literature and education. Today he lives and farms on the family farm at Port Royal, Kentucky, alongside the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio.

He is a prolific author, with at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and eleven novels and short story collections to his name. His writing is rooted in the notion that one's work ought to be connected with one's place. His poetic voice is simple and resonant, a kind of plainsong, usually similar in tone to Jane Kenyon but occasionally veering into the territory of Walt Whitman or Biblical prophets.

Teachings

His nonfiction serves as a long defense of the life in which he finds value. According to Berry, this good life includes: sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, the Gospels, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, stewardship of Creation, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, peacemaking and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, our declining topsoil, global economics, environmental destruction.

As An Agrarianist

Wendell Berry is often cited as a defender of agrarian ideals and frequently voices his appreciation for the Amish. [[1]]

As An Environmental Writer

Wendell Berry is an important figure in the history of American nature writing and environmental writing, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, Marilynne Robinson, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben, David Orr and others.

Quotations

  • "What I stand for is what I stand on."
  • "Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."
  • "Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."
  • "Eating is an agricultural act."
  • "Every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing...Love someone who doesn't deserve it...Plant sequoias...Practice resurrection."
  • "There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the American flag when we tolerate, encourage, and as a daily business promote the desecration of the Country for which it stands."
  • "Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias."
  • "Practice resurrection."
  • "The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare -- warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself." --Lindsey Wilson College commencement

Works

Fiction

  • Nathan Coulter, 1960 novel
  • A Place on Earth, 1967 revised 1983 novel
  • The Memory of Old Jack, 1974 novel
  • The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986
  • Remembering, 1988 novel
  • The Discovery of Kentucky, 1991 story
  • Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992
  • How Ptolemy Proudfoot Lost A Bet, 1992
  • A Consent, 1993 story
  • Watch with Me: And Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994
  • A World Lost, 1997 novel
  • Two More Stories Of The Port William Membership, 1997
  • Jayber Crow, 2000 novel
  • Sonata At Payne Hollow, 2001 play
  • Three Short Novels: Nathan Coulter; Remembering; A World Lost, 2002
  • That Distant Land : The Collected Stories of Wendell Berry, 2004
  • Hannah Coulter, 2004 novel

Nonfiction

  • The Hidden Wound, 1970
  • The Long-Legged House, 1971
  • A Continuous Harmony : Essays Cultural and Agricultural, 1971
  • The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge, 1971
  • The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1978 essays
  • Recollected Essays, 1965-1980, 1981
  • The Gift of Good Land; Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural, 1981
  • Standing by Words, 1983
  • Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship, 1984 editor with Wes Jackson and Bruce Colman
  • Home Economics, 1987
  • What Are People For?, 1990
  • Descendants and Ancestors of Captain James W. Berry, 1990 with Laura Berry
  • Standing on Earth, 1991 essays
  • What can turn us from this deserted future... , 1991 broadside
  • The Discovery of Kentucky, 1991
  • Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1992 biography
  • Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community : Eight Essays, 1993
  • Another Turn of the Crank, 1995 essays
  • Three On Community, 1996 essays, with Gary Snyder and Carole Koda
  • Late Harvest: Rural American Writing by Edward Abbey, et al (July 1996)
  • Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, 1997 with Mark Dowie and David T. Hanson
  • Grace, Photographs of Rural America, 2000 with Gregory Spaid and Gene Logsdon
  • Life Is a Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition, 2001 (in part, a response to E.O. Wilson's book Consilience)
  • In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World, 2001
  • The Art Of The Commonplace The Agrarian Essays Of Wendell Berry, 2002 edited by Norman Wirzba
  • Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, by Wendell Berry, Dorothy L. Sayers, Blaise Pascal, 2002
  • Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership In An Age Of Terror, 2003 with David James Duncan
  • Citizenship Papers, 2003
  • Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy by James Baker Hall, Wendell Berry (Contributor), 2004
  • The Way of Ignorance, November 2005
  • Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings of Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness, November 2005
  • The Unforeseen Wilderness : Kentucky's Red River Gorge by Wendell Berry, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, March 2006

Poetry

  • November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three, 1964 poem
  • The Broken Ground, 1964 poems
  • Openings: Poems, 1968
  • Findings, 1969 poems
  • Farming: A Handbook, 1970 poems
  • The Country of Marriage, 1973 poems
  • Sayings & Doings, 1975 poems
  • To What Listens, 1975 poems
  • Horses, 1975 chapbook poem
  • Kentucky River, Two Poems, 1976
  • There is Singing Around Me, 1976 poems
  • Clearing, 1977 poems
  • Three Memorial Poems, 1977
  • The Gift of Gravity, 1979 poems
  • A Part, 1980 poems
  • The Salad, 1980 chapbook poem
  • The Wheel, 1982
  • From the Distance, 1982 broadside
  • Collected Poems 1957-1982, 1985
  • The Wild Rose, 1986 broadside
  • The Landscape of Harmony, 1987
  • Sabbaths, 1987 poems
  • I go from the woods into the cleared field, 1987 broadside poem
  • Traveling at Home, 1989 poems
  • Sayings & Doings and An Eastward Look, 1990 poems
  • The Peace of Wild Things, 1991 poem
  • Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, 1994 poem
  • Entries: Poems, 1994
  • Amish Economy, 1996 poem
  • A Timbered Choir:The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997, 1998
  • Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1998
  • Sabbaths 2002, 2004 chapbook
  • Given, 2005 poems

Lectures

Interviews

  • Field Observations: An Interview with Wendell Berry by Jordan Fisher-Smith--[3]
  • Lannan Foundation, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder 2001--[4]
  • Sojourners Magazine Interview, July 2004--[5]
  • Wendell Berry in: Conversations With Kentucky Writers, L. Elisabeth Beattie (Editor)

Awards

  • Guggenheim & Rockefeller Fellowships
  • Jean Stein Award
  • T.S. Eliot Award
  • Lannan Foundation Award for nonfiction
  • 2000 Poets’ Prize
  • Thomas Merton Award, 1999
  • Aiken Taylor Award for poetry
  • John Hay Award of the Orion Society

Books about Berry

  • Angyal, Andrew. Wendell Berry. New York: Twayne, 1995.
  • Goodrich, Janet. The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001.
  • Merchant, Paul, ed. Wendell Berry (American Authors Series). Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1991.
  • Smith, Kimberly K. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace. Lawrence: U P of Kansas, 2003.
  • Mindy Weinreb, “A Question a Day: A Written Conversation with Wendell Berry,” in Wendell Berry (American Authors Series), edited by Paul Merchant (Lewiston: Confluence Press, 1991).

See Also

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