Wendell Berry (Carnegie Center)
In honor of Wendell Berry, who died this week at age ninety-two, we present this collection of tributes from friends, admirers, and collaborators, hailing from the diverse spheres Berry connected: farming, food, literature, and finding our place in a complex, continuously changing world. Across genres, Berry was one of America’s most profound interpreters of place and people. The author of more than fifty books, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2010.
Click the links below to jump to each contributor’s reflection.
Laura Dunn | Paul Kingsnorth | Bill McKibben | Russell Moore | Jay Parini | Stefanie Peters | Andrew Peterson | Michael Pollan | Jack Shoemaker
I met Wendell Berry in the winter of 2004. My boyfriend (Jef) and I had risked our lives, or so we thought, making an Odyssean trek through Henry County in the aftermath of a huge snowstorm. Our car literally slid on thick ice down the steep, narrow road to Lanes Landing Farm. And as we finally arrived, safely, Wendell pulled up alongside us in a weathered, white pick-up truck, rolled down the window, and said gruffly, “I was hoping you wouldn’t come!”
[Berry’s wife] Tanya was away visiting her mother, who was ill, and so while Wendell kindly welcomed us into his home, he apologized for the lack of hospitality. I think he offered us a ginger ale. We sat with him in his living room, one whole wall lined with books, warmed by a wood-burning stove, and talked for a while before recording him reading one of his poems. I was working on our first feature film, about a spring-fed swimming hole in Texas threatened by development, and was trying to find a way out of the despair that comes when you’ve only done the Math. A particular poem, “Santa Clara Valley,” from one of Wendell’s Sabbaths collections, lit an otherwise dark path. I asked him about the refrain of the word “unforeseen.” What does it mean, and what is its significance? He paused for a moment and then said something like this: “When you make a commitment, like marriage, you make that commitment fully without knowing what will come. That’s the unforeseen.”
Jef and I married that summer, and I gave birth to our first of seven sons the following spring. Wendell’s gifts are too many to count; his words often, still, shape my thoughts. The gift of his marriage to Tanya is the one for which I am most grateful. Their example is with me daily as we strive and hope to find wholeness in a broken world.
Laura Dunn is the director and producer of numerous award-winning documentary films, including Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry (2017).
I first came across Wendell Berry’s work as a young environmental writer and activist in England back in the 1990s, and though I could not have found Kentucky on a map (and probably still can’t), I found in this writer a calm yet passionate moral certainty that I lacked myself, because I had no grounding in any of the places it came from. He has been a great influence on my own work ever since. I regard him as an American great, and also a prophet whose time is yet to come.
Paul Kingsnorth is an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist. He is the author of ten books, including the Booker Prize–longlisted novel The Wake and the recent New York Times bestseller Against the Machine. He is co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of writers and artists.
Berry with a statue of his great grandfather (National Endowment for the Humanities)
I can’t think of another writer who has managed to mean so much to readers across the three genres of poetry, essays, and fiction. But Wendell’s great work, in many ways, was his life—his decision to abandon a New York literary career, to return to the world where he’d grown up, and there to take up the work of community. America has often been spoken for by the great heroic individual—Berry (and if you read his meditations on Huck Finn, you’ll understand this at a cellular level) was the voice that kept saying it was all of us together, the “membership,” that constituted reality.
Bill McKibben is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, and edited the LOA volume American Earth. He is scholar in residence at Middlebury College.
When I heard of Wendell Berry’s death, I thought of hearing someone once say that the death of any person is like a library burning to the ground.
The loss is not just that person’s company, but all that he thought, all that he felt, all the wisdom and knowledge and imagination he had accumulated over seventy, eighty, ninety years of life. At Wendell Berry’s life, I am tempted to say that we have recovered the library, almost literally. After all, an entire wall of my study is lined with Wendell Berry books—essays, poems, short stories, and novels of the Port William Membership.
This Thursday night a group of friends and I are gathering to reminisce about Mr. Berry’s influence on us and, should any of us forget a line of a Sabbath poem or which Catlett said what to which Coulter, we can pull a book off the shelf and find it.
“He lives on in his books,” we might say. And in some sense, that’s true enough.
Why, with all of the accumulated writings of Wendell Berry, the poems, the novels, the short stories, the essays, the letters that haven’t even been collected yet, one might be able to upload all of it into an artificially intelligent computer program and have “What would Wendell Berry think about . . . ” conversations at will. Even writing that for the sake of argument makes me fearful a Mad Farmer will appear and destroy the page in front of me. Wendell Berry, after all, taught us better than that.
Wendell Berry, after all, was not just a collection of stories or of arguments. He told us that about himself. When people confused him as gentle because he praised gentleness or gracious because he praised grace, Mr. Berry confessed, “I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.”
That’s because Wendell Berry did not see himself as a machine, and he told us that our desire to see ourselves and each other that way leads to madness and misery, lying and loneliness. That, one might conclude, was a losing cause. And maybe it is. “To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart,” Berry wrote.
But that’s the vision he showed us, speaking to us imagination to imagination, about a creation that can be more than an environment, a culture that can be more than a market, persons who can be more than machines.
It does, indeed, feel like a library has burned to the ground—a library where some of us found a home.
“No individual is an end in itself,” he wrote. “One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves as answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time.”
Wendell Berry was loved by Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, and those who, like Old Jack, prefer to skip church but tip a hat to “Old Marster.” A Christian, as was Mr. Berry, I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting, so I think the Wendell Berry story is held together by more than just memory. That doesn’t mean that we haven’t lost. At the very least, it does, indeed, feel like a library has burned to the ground—a library where some of us found a home.
At the very end of Marce Catlett, Berry’s last Port William novel, Andy Catlett looks at what remains of his old home, now almost disappeared, and grieves what is gone. Berry writes, “As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.”
Wendell Berry is gone. We carry those stories now. We are the ones who stop in the middle of an argument to think how it’s better to “rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.” We are the ones who, anytime we see a seed, will think “Plant sequoias.” We are the ones who will flinch every time we hear a Secretary of Agriculture use the word “efficiency.”
We will feel grief that the one who gave us those is gone. But then we will let the grief lead us to gratitude. That’s what Wendell Berry taught us. A library has burned, yes, but Wendell Berry was more than a library. He was more than an agrarian or a contrarian or any of the labels affixed on him. He was more than an ag policy. He was more than Port William. A wonder. That’s what he was.
And maybe, in a time where killing “everybody who’s against peace” sounds normal, we can see those around us as less than the gods they want to be, more than the machines they think they are. Maybe we can see what people are for. Maybe we can remember that life is a miracle.
Wendell Berry taught us that.
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today.
Berry in Henry County, Kentucky, in the 1970s (photo: James Baker Hall)
Wendell Berry was—it saddens me to use the past tense here—among the handful of writers and thinkers who meant most to me over the past half century. He was easily among the best essayists we’ve had in America, a fierce polemical writer who advocated for farmers and farming, who stood against the mindlessly destructive greed of agribusiness, and who argued for a way of life that arises from the land itself, from rural communities. He was also a lyrical poet of a high order, and his fiction, too—much of it set in rural Kentucky—repays careful rereading. Over six decades, Berry—whom I knew a little and loved a lot—summoned a vision of the good life, and he showed us how to live it. We can only be grateful that he moved among us for so many productive years.
Jay Parini is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College and a poet, novelist, biographer, and critic. He is the author of Robert Frost: A Life and Why Poetry Matters, among other works of nonfiction. His books of poetry include New and Collected Poems, 1975–2015 and The Art of Subtraction.
When I’m asked to describe our work at Library of America, I often will talk about preserving the work of the writers who are the essential voices in our national conversation. For me, Wendell Berry is that, and his voice will only get more important. Always provoking, always interesting, and usually right, he not only got directly at the truly essential questions but also exposed the shallow arguments of both the left and the right in equal measure.
His writing is also, as he was, extraordinarily kind, generous, and funny. His fiction paints a portrait of a rural community so compellingly and lovingly that readers either find themselves and their families beautifully pictured or fall in love with people they might otherwise never have understood. That ability, to make bridges and heal divisions through art, was a gift to all of us. It has been a gift to me.
Stefanie Peters is associate editor at Library of America.
Berry with LOA editors Stefanie Peters and Trish Hoard
The news of Wendell Berry’s death has produced in me the same quality of resolution that his life and writings did. I resolve to live close to the earth and to love it as God does. I resolve to live in community and to trust that the difficulties it brings are worth the goodness that it promises. I resolve to make choices rooted in my belief that death is something to grieve and not to fear, because, in spite of our best efforts to ruin things, there is good reason to hope that resurrection has the final word. Wendell was a farmer, and any farmer worth his salt knows that spring, miraculously and against all odds, happens.
Andrew Peterson is a singer, songwriter, author, and founder of the Rabbit Room.
Wendell was a key inspiration for the food movement, without question. There was his direct influence—reminding Americans of the importance of farmers, who had been all but written off during the industrialization of agriculture, and also of the role even urban eaters have to play, since, as he famously wrote, “eating is an agricultural act.” What we choose to eat and not eat has a powerful effect on the land, on farmers, and on all the other people who bring food to our plates. We urbanites had become so disconnected from farming that this simple message resonated loudly and in fact helped inspire the food movement beginning in the early 2000s.
He was one of my heroes, but along two distinct axes: as a thinker, I first encountered Wendell when writing Second Nature. He showed me a path out of the blunt nature vs. culture binary (as we would call it now!) that dominated American thinking about nature going back to the Puritans and through Emerson and Thoreau.
As a thinker, he was an antidote to the American romance of wilderness, which takes you only so far and doesn’t get you fed.
I was a gardener, and Wendell understood the value of marrying nature and culture, rather than pitting them against one another. Thoreau wouldn’t discriminate against weeds; Wendell taught me my quarrel with them was “legitimate.”
So, he taught me how to garden and how to think about my relationship to the natural world in a much more useful and practical way than Thoreau ever did. As a thinker, he was an antidote to the American romance of wilderness, which takes you only so far and doesn’t get you fed.
As a writer, he was a critical model for me—his sentences, so sturdy, with a cushion of space between every word. He wrote in the American vernacular of the sermon, which gave people the impression he was dour and censorious in person. In fact, he was warm, very funny, and curious about other people, a pleasure to be around, and nothing like the preacher you might have prepared to meet.
Michael Pollan is the author of ten books, including This is Your Mind on Plants (2021), How to Change Your Mind (2018), Cooked (2013), Food Rules (2009), In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008), The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), and The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001). His most recent book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, was published in 2026.
Berry signs a copy of Port William Novels & Stories (The Civil War to World War II) at the Berry Center (Virginia Berry Aguilar / The Berry Center)
Wendell Berry has been long occupied by the art of freedom and the idea of freedom in community. He was a writer deeply involved in the complex matters of ethics and consequence. No one dealt more carefully with the arts of Christian love and hope and family. Living in our time, he constantly saw a need to ask, “Sure we can do that, but should we? What do we do with the consequences?”
A remarkable poet, he was also one of the greatest living masters of American prose. His style advances the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Crane, listens to Twain and admires Stegner, and ignores almost entirely Hemingway and his modernist cohorts.
Jack Shoemaker was the cofounder and editor-in-chief of North Point Press, and later cofounded Counterpoint Press. He worked with Wendell Berry for more than fifty years.
Berry at the 2011 Washington Post “The Future of Food” conference in Washington, DC (Encyclopedia Brittanica)
