Robert D. McFadden writes:

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky. He was 92.

His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed the death.

Lanky and rawboned in middle age, with melancholy eyes, a jutting chin and a widow’s peak reminiscent of Lincoln’s, Mr. Berry wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction and argument that championed small family farms, the environment, local foods and interdependent communities, and railed against chemicals, most technologies, agribusiness and distant government.

“The national economy that is really run for the benefit of a very few people is preying upon and slowly destroying local communities everywhere,” Mr. Berry told Sierra magazine in 1990. “Everything we produce in rural America makes more money for other people than it does for those who produce it. We’re destroying rural America.”

Mr. Berry was once hailed by the author and historian Page Smith as “a prophetic American voice of our day.” He never became a household name but, as his oeuvre grew over a half-century, advocates of agrarian and ecological causes embraced his work as an eloquent, if sometimes didactic, expression of their own hopes. Some critics likened his landed exhortations to those of Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson.

Toward the end of his long fight for agrarian justice, waged from a cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky, Mr. Berry was showered with honors, including the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest award for humanitarian services, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House in 2011, “for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist.”

Raised on a farm in north-central Kentucky, he studied English at the University of Kentucky and writing at Stanford with the environmentalist-novelist Wallace Stegner, traveled in Italy and landed in New York, intending to write and teach. He married, had two children and taught for two years at New York University.

But at 30, he confronted in himself a deep need to return to his roots — specifically, to an old two-room cabin on the Kentucky River at Port Royal, in Henry County, where his ancestors had lived since 1803. The cabin had been built in the 1920s by a great-uncle. He had known the place all his life; indeed, had visited it often as a boy and spent a summer there with his wife, Tanya.

“In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted — and it was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige,” he recalled in an essay titled for its inspirational setting, “The Long-Legged House.”

In 1964, the couple resolved to stay and work the land. Nearby, they bought a 125-acre farm, called Lanes Landing, and started raising sheep, corn and grain crops, and planted gardens for their own table. Mr. Berry also initiated a 20-year teaching association at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington.

Returning to his home as a place to write for the rest of his life was a way to insure, to himself, that he would always be bound by the truth, Mr. Berry said in a phone interview in 2018 for this obituary. [Continue reading…]