Kentucky-born author who advocated simpler life has died
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NEW YORK -- Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian who in poems, stories, novels and essays celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned of the excesses and misjudgments of an industrial, commercialized society, has died. He was 92.
His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed on Monday that he died in his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.
"There's not enough I could say about him to do him justice," she told The Associated Press.
Few authors were more tied to their home than Berry, an intellectual and spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau and such Southern agrarians as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. In prose and poetry that mirrored the uncluttered and deeply felt life he advocated, Berry challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness and renewed the mysteries of birth, love, work and death. He had learned from his own history: Berry was born and raised in a farming town during the Great Depression and watched its seemingly immortal ties unravel by his teens.
"Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world," he wrote in "Andy Catlett: Early Travels," a novel published in 2006, "and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater."
Berry was a prolific writer who published more than 40 books, including the novels "Nathan Coulter" and "A Place on Earth," and the anthology "A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997."
He was among the most prominent authors never to receive a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award, although his honors included a National Humanities Medal and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, he was presented a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.
A simpler time
The tall, slender Berry imagined, chronicled and lived out his vision of a self-sustaining community in which no one had to ask where their food came from or the names of their neighbors. In the classic farming manifesto "The Unsettling of America," published in 1977, he attacked the consolidation and mechanization of agriculture as a violation of the natural order, whether of the land or of the spirit.
"The modern urban‐industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth," he wrote. "At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and experts sets up a profit‐making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation."
Berry yearned for the past but was "painfully divided" by his awareness that "my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors" and that "people were once bought and sold here by my people." He saw the U.S. as plagued by "disorderly violence," and inflamed by the rootlessness of the early settlers and the corporations that followed.
"We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America," he lamented.