Poet, novelist, environmentalist, and farmer Wendell Berry is the author of more than 60 books, encompassing poetry, fiction, and essay collections. He was born in New Castle, Kentucky, into a multigenerational farming family. He attended the University of Kentucky at Lexington, earning a BA in English in 1956 and an MA in 1957, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University’s creative writing program.
Berry married Tanya Amyx in 1957, and the newly married couple soon spent a year in Tuscany via his Guggenheim Fellowship. He taught at New York University for two years, then returned to his home state to teach at the University of Kentucky. In 1965, he purchased Lane’s Landing, a farm near Port Royal abutting land his mother’s family had once farmed, to live on with his wife and two children. He resigned from teaching in 1977 and began farming and writing full-time, returning to the university from 1987 through 1993. He also worked as a contributing editor to New Farm Magazine and Organic Gardening and Farming.
Berry’s principled stances on issues such as stewardship of the environment, sustainable family farming, pacificism, and traditional communitarian values deeply inform his writing in all genres. He has drawn comparisons to figures such as William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau. His poetry collections include This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems (2014), New Collected Poems (2012), Given (2005), A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (1997), Entries: Poems (1994), Traveling at Home (1989), The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1988), Collected Poems 1957-1982 (1985), Clearing (1977), There Is Singing Around Me (1976), The Country of Marriage (1973), and The Broken Ground (1964). Much of his fiction takes place in Port William, a fictional Kentucky town resembling his hometown, in the first half of the 20th century, elegizing the agrarian way of life in the United States that began to disappear after World War II. His influential prose works include the seminal environmental text The Unsettling of America (1977).
Berry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal. Berry’s many other accolades include the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Books Critics Circle, and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
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More Wendell Berry
Audio/Text: Listen to poems read by Berry for On Being
Video: Bill Moyers interviews Berry for Moyers & Co.
Text: Read poetry by Berry at the Academy of American Poets
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Photo by Guy Mendes.