Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934, in Henry County, Kentucky) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He was raised in the tobacco-farming region of north-central Kentucky, a landscape that has remained the center of his life and work. He studied at the University of Kentucky, earning a bachelor's and master's degree in English, and later attended Stanford University's creative writing program under Wallace Stegner, alongside writers such as Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey. After a period teaching and living in California, Europe, and New York City, where he taught at New York University, Berry made the decisive choice in 1965 to return to Kentucky with his wife, Tanya, and settle at Lane's Landing Farm near Port Royal, on the Kentucky River. He has farmed there ever since, and that commitment to a single place has shaped nearly everything he has written. Berry taught English at the University of Kentucky for many years before devoting himself fully to writing and farming. His work spans poetry, fiction, and essays, and across all three forms he returns to a consistent set of concerns: the health of land and community, the dignity of manual work, the dangers of industrial agriculture, and the corrosive effects of consumer culture on human relationships and rural life. His fiction centers on the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, a recurring setting through which he traces generations of interconnected families and neighbors in novels and story collections including Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, and A World Lost. His poetry, collected in volumes such as The Country of Marriage, Farming: A Hand Book, and his long-running Sabbath Poems, is marked by plain language, close attention to the natural world, and a meditative, often spiritual tone. His essays, including those in The Unsettling of America, The Gift of Good Land, What Are People For?, and Life Is a Miracle, form an extended argument for agrarian values, ecological responsibility, and local economies, and have made him one of the most influential American voices in environmental and agrarian thought. Berry has received numerous honors, including the National Humanities Medal, the Jefferson Lecture from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the T. S. Eliot Award, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He continues to live and farm in Kentucky, and his body of work, now spanning more than six decades, remains unified by a central conviction: that a right relationship with the land and with one's neighbors is inseparable from a well-lived life.
74 works on Textopian