Celebrating the Life of Wendell E. Berry

In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal to Wendell E. Berry at a White House ceremony. A novelist and poet, Berry dedicated his life to both farming and writing. His family had farmed the same land in Henry County, Kentucky, for seven generations. Berry passed away at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at the age of 92.

Berry began his career in academia. He studied at the University of Kentucky and Stanford before becoming an English professor at New York University at 28. However, city life did not appeal to him. In his 1968 essay, “A Native Hill,” Berry described why he left New York’s literary world to return to Kentucky. “I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life.” He fulfilled this hope.

The farmland in Henry County inspired much of Berry’s writing. He criticized industrial farming and distrusted technology. Berry never owned a computer, choosing instead to handwrite his work and type it on a 1956 typewriter he never replaced. His writing focused on slowing down and observing his surroundings, often capturing the essence of nature, as seen in his 2001 poem “June Wind”:

Light and wind are running
Over the headed grass
As though the hill had
Melted and now flowed.

Berry also addressed political issues through his work. His 1968 poem “Against the War in Vietnam” critiqued the effects of modern progress: “In the name of ourselves we ride at the wheels of our engines, in the name of Plenty devouring all, the exhaust of our progress falling deadly on villages and fields we do not see. We are prepared for millions of little deaths.”

In 2012, President Obama awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal. In 2015, he became the first living author in the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. During a 1998 interview for NPR’s All Things Considered, Berry hesitated to advise young people on their life paths. Still, he suggested they “stop some place, and stay there. Learn the history of it, and the names of the plants and animals and the neighbors.”

Wendell Berry’s writing teaches us the value of slowing down and appreciating the world around us.