Novelist and poet Wendell Berry spent his life farming his land for food and for prose. It was land his family farmed and lived on for seven generations before him, in Henry County Kentucky.
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He died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky at age 92.
Berry started his career as a writer as an academic. He studied at the University of Kentucky, then Stanford, and had taken a prestigious position as an English professor at New York University by the time he was 28. But city life was never for him.
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In the 1968 essay , Berry wrote about his decision to leave behind the New York literary world just two years into his career, in favor of his home county in 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.”
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It was a hope he accomplished. The land Berry farmed in Henry County became the primary inspiration for his work as a writer and as an environmentalist. He was a stark critic of industrialized farming, and generally skeptical of technology. He never owned a computer–preferring instead to hand write his work, and then type it up on a typewriter he purchased new in 1956 and never needed to replace.
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Berry’s writing was an endeavor in slowing down, and noticing his surroundings – whether these were trees, people, or the imprint of a breeze on a hill – as in the 2001 poem “June Wind.”
“Light and wind are running
Over the headed grass
As though the hill had
Melted and now flowed.”
Other poems used similarly sharp prose to comment on the broader political sphere. “Against the War in Vietnam” was published in 1968.
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“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.”
Berry was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2012, and he became the first living author inducted into the Kentucky writer’s Hall of Fame in 2015.
In a 1998 interview for All Things Considered, Berry was hesitant to provide advice to young people looking to take after him, telling NPR’s Noah Adams, “I think advising the young about a life course is probably not a responsible thing to do.”
But when pressed, Berry added that, if at all possible, young people should look for opportunities 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 writing is a lesson for the ages on slowing down, noticing, and deeply loving and respecting our surroundings.
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