Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, essayist, poet, teacher, cultural critic and farmer. He is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays.

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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 lawyer and tobacco farmer in Henry County, and at least five generations in both his father's and mother's families have lived in Henry County as farmers. He attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute, and then pursued a Bachelor's 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, Edward Abbey and Ken Kesey. In 1964 he and Tanya purchased the Lane's Landing farm close to his parents' birth places, and in 1965 moved onto the land to become farmers (of tobacco, corn and small grains) on what would eventually become a 125-acre homestead.

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 the University of Kentucky, teaching literature and education. Today he still lives, writes and farms at Lane's Landing near 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 grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place. His poetic voice is direct and resonant, indebted as much to Hesiod and Virgil as to Whitman, as much to William Carlos Williams as to Ronsard, Wordsworth, or Alexander Pope.

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Ideas in Berry's work

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.

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

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The Port William fiction

Berry’s fiction to date consists of seven novels and the twenty-three short stories collected in That Distant Land (2004), which, when read as a whole, form a chronicle of the small Kentucky town of Port William.

In light of this long-term, ongoing exploration of the life of an imagined place, Berry has often been compared to William Faulkner. Yet, although Port William is no stranger to murder, suicide, alcoholism, and the full range of losses that touch human lives, it lacks the extreme delineation of character and plot that is found in much of Faulkner. For this reason, Berry is sometimes described as working in an idealized, pastoral, or even utopian mode, but he resists this characterization of his work.

The Port William fiction is Berry’s attempt to portray, on a local scale, what "a human economy ... conducted with reverence" (The Way of Ignorance, 50) has looked like in the past -- and what civic, domestic, and personal virtues might be evoked by some such economy if it were pursued today.

The effect of a profound shift in the agricultural practices of the United States, and the disappearance of agrarian life, is one of the great concerns of the Port William fiction, though the theme appears frequently as only a background or subtext to the stories themselves. Social changes, as well as seasonal ones, mark the passage of time. It is clear to those who read Berry’s essays that the Port William stories allow him to explore the human dimensions of the decline of the family farm and farm community as it encounters the expansion of post-World War II agribusiness influences. But these works rarely fall into a simple didacticism and are never merely tales of decline. Each is grounded in a concern for the honest depiction of character and community. In A Place on Earth (1967), for example, farmer Mat Feltner must come to terms with the loss of his only son, Virgil. In the course of the novel, we see how not only Mat but the entire community wrestles with the acute and very precise costs of World War II.

Berry’s fiction also allows him to explore the literal and metaphorical implications of marriage as that which binds individuals, families, and communities to each other and to Nature itself - though, not all of Port William is happily or conventionally married. “Old Jack” Beechum struggles with significant incompatibilities with his wife and a brief, yet fulfilling extramarital affair; barber Jayber Crow lives with forlorn, secret, unconsumated love for a woman and the belief that he is mentally married to her though she knows nothing about it; and Burley Coulter never formalizes his bond with Kate Helen Branch, the mother of his son. Yet, each of these men find themselves firmly bound up in the community, the “membership,” of Port William.

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Quotations

  • "We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us... We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it."
  • "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."
  • "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
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Works

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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
  • 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
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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
  • Late Harvest: Rural American Writing, 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 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
  • Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership In An Age Of Terror, 2003
  • 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
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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


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Interviews

  • Field Observations: An Interview with Wendell Berry by Jordan Fisher-Smith--[2]
  • Sojourners Magazine Interview, July 2004--[3]
  • Wendell Berry in: Conversations With Kentucky Writers, L. Elisabeth Beattie (Editor)
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Awards

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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.
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See also

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External links

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