Wendell Berry, Author Who Championed Farm Life, Dies at 92

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian who celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned against the excesses of an industrial, commercialized society, has died at 92.

His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed on Monday that he died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. "There's not enough I could say about him to do him justice," she told The Associated Press.

Few authors were as tied to their home as Berry, who was described as an intellectual and spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau and Southern agrarians such as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. Born and raised in a farming town during the Great Depression, Berry watched its traditions unravel by his teens, and his writing challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness.

Berry published more than 40 books, including the novels "Nathan Coulter" and "A Place on Earth," and the anthology "A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997." His influence extended well beyond Kentucky — author Michael Pollan said his life was changed by Berry's declaration that "Eating is an agricultural act," and chef Alice Waters cited him as a favorite author.

He was among the most prominent American authors never to win a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award, though his honors included a National Humanities Medal, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2016 lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.

In his 1977 farming manifesto "The Unsettling of America," Berry attacked the consolidation and mechanization of agriculture as a violation of the natural order. Most of his fiction was set in the rural town of Port William and closely drawn from his own childhood.

Berry was also known for controversial views shaped by what he called being "painfully divided" over his ancestors' role in displacing Native Americans and enslaving people. In 2020, he and his wife Tanya filed a lawsuit objecting to the removal of a Depression-era fresco from the University of Kentucky that had long been criticized for allegedly sanitizing the history of slavery.