Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934, Henry County, Kentucky) is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is also an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. August 5 is the 217th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (218th in leap years), with 148 days remaining. ... 1934 (MCMXXXIV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Henry County is a county located in the state of Kentucky. ... An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, and speculate on a variety of different ideas. ... A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole and typically on a radical basis. ... Economics (deriving from the Greek words οίκω [okos], house, and νέμω [nemo], rules hence household management) is the social science that studies the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants. ... Traditional Eastern European Farmer Woman. ... A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative, typically in prose. ... This article is in need of attention. ... Poetry (ancient Greek: poieo = create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... An essay is a short work of writing that treats a topic from an authors personal point of view. ... The Fellowship of Southern Writers is a literary organization headquartered at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. ...

Biography

Berry is the second of two children born to John Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer in Henry County, and Virginia Berry. The families of both of his parents have farmed in Henry County for at least five generations. Berry attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute, then earned a B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky. In 1957, he completed his M.A. and married Tanya Amyx. In 1958, he attended Stanford University's creative writing program thanks to a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, studying under Stegner in a seminar that included Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, and Ken Kesey. In 1961, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship took Berry and his family to Italy and France. From 1962 to 1964, he taught English at New York University's University College in the Bronx. In 1964, he began teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, from which he resigned in 1977. Species Nicotiana acuminata Nicotiana alata Nicotiana attenuata Nicotiana benthamiana Nicotiana clevelandii Nicotiana excelsior Nicotiana forgetiana Nicotiana glauca Nicotiana glutinosa Nicotiana langsdorffii Nicotiana longiflora Nicotiana obtusifolia Nicotiana paniculata Nicotiana plumbagifolia Nicotiana quadrivalvis Nicotiana repanda Nicotiana rustica Nicotianasuaveolens Nicotiana sylvestris Nicotiana tabacum Nicotiana tomentosa Ref: ITIS 30562 as of August 26, 2005... Millersburg Military Instute was founded in Millersburg Kentucky. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The University of Kentucky, also referred to as UK, is a public, co-educational university located in Lexington, Kentucky. ... Creative writing is a term used to distinguish certain imaginative or different types of writing from technical writing. ... Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909—April 13, 1993) was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. ... One of McMurtrys bookstores in Archer City, Texas Larry McMurtry (born June 3, 1936 in Wichita Falls, Texas) is an Academy Award winning screenwriter, American novelist and essayist. ... Edward Paul Abbey (January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies. ... Kenneth Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and as a (counter) cultural figure who, some consider, was a link between the beat generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. ... New York University (NYU) is a major research university in New York City. ... Housing projects in the infamous South Bronx area. ... Creative writing is a term used to distinguish certain imaginative or different types of writing from technical writing. ... The University of Kentucky, also referred to as UK, is a public, co-educational university located in Lexington, Kentucky. ...

In 1965, Berry moved to a farm he had purchased, Lane's Landing, and began growing tobacco, corn and small grains on what eventually grew into a 125-acre homestead. Lane's Landing is near Port Royal, Kentucky, in northwestern Kentucky, and his parents' birthplaces, and is on the banks of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio River. Berry has farmed, resided, and written at Lane's Landing down to the present day. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he edited and wrote for the Rodale Press, including its publications Organic Gardening and Farming and The New Farm. In 1987, he returned to the English Department of the University of Kentucky. The Kentucky River is a tributary of the Ohio River, 259 mi (417 km) long, in the U.S. state of Kentucky. ... The Ohio River is the largest tributary by volume of the Mississippi River. ... Rodale Inc. ...

Berry has written at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and eleven novels and short story collections. His writing is grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place. A modern day chapbook. ...

Berry was a member of the Lindisfarne Association, a group founded by poet William Irwin Thompson for the interdisciplinary discussion of emerging consciousness, despite Berry's deep objections to the planetary trend of the group's values. The Lindisfarne Association is a group of intellectuals of diverse interests organized by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson for the purpose of bringing about a planetary consciousness. ... William Irwin Thompson (1938- ) is a writer, social critic, and visionary, especially interested in keeping alive the esoteric, most profound, human and spiritual traditions of mankind, as he sees it. ...

Ideas in Berry's work

It has been suggested that Solving for pattern be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

His nonfiction serves as an extended conversation about the life he values. According to Berry, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics, and environmental destruction. Berry is among the most eloquently Christian of contemporary authors, frequently referring to the Gospels, the stewardship of Creation, and peacemaking. Image File history File links Please see the file description page for further information. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Wendell Berry. ... Non-fiction is a truthful account or representation of a subject which is composed of facts. ... Appropriate technology is the term used to describe objects which meet the needs of the local people and the environment in which they live. ... Rural area in Dalarna, Sweden Qichun, a rural town in Hubei province, China Rural areas (also referred to as the country, countryside) are sparsely settled places away from the influence of large cities. ... A community usually refers to a sociological group in a large place or collections of plant or animal organisms sharing an environment. ... In general stewardship is responsibility for taking good care of resources entrusted to one. ... This page is a candidate to be moved to Wiktionary. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... A miracle, derived from the old Latin word miraculum meaning something wonderful, is a striking interposition of divine intervention by a god in the universe by which the ordinary course and operation of Nature is overruled, suspended, or modified. ... Frugality (also known as thrift or thriftiness), often confused with cheapness or miserliness, is a traditional value, life style, or belief system, in which individuals practice both restraint in the acquiring of and resourceful use of economic goods and services in order to achieve lasting and more fulfilling goals. ... The Oxford English Dictionary defines reverence as deep respect and veneration for some thing, place, or person regarded as having a sacred or exalted character. ... Modern Dairy farm Industrial agriculture, also known as factory farming, refers to the industrialized production of livestock, poultry, fish, and crops. ... Galunggung in 1982, showing a combination of natural events. ... Topsoil is the uppermost layer of soil, usually the top six to eight inches. ... The Microsoft building in Bangalore, the information technology capital of India A KFC franchise in Kuwait. ... This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Christians believe that Jesus is the mediator of the New Covenant (see Hebrews 8:6). ... For the genre of Christian-themed music, see gospel music. ... In general stewardship is responsibility for taking good care of resources entrusted to one. ... Creation (theology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Peacemaking is a form of conflict resolution which focuses on establishing equal power relationships that will be robust enough to forestall future conflict, and establishing some means of agreeing on ethical decisions within a community that has previously had conflict. ...

Berry is a major defender of agrarian values. His appreciation for traditional farming techniques, such as those of the Amish, grew in the 1970s, due in part to exchanges with Draft Horse Journal publisher Maurice Telleen. Berry has long been friendly to and supportive of Wes Jackson, believing that Jackson's agricultural research at The Land Institute lives out the promise of "solving for pattern" and using "nature as model." The Amish (IPA: ), are an Anabaptist Christian denomination in the United States and Ontario, Canada that are known for their plain dress and limited use of modern devices such as automobiles and electricity. ... Wes Jackson is the founder and current president of the Land Institute. ... The Land Institute works for agriculture to change from annuals grown in large fields of the same plant type to perennials grown as mixed species. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Wendell Berry. ...

The Port William fiction

Berry's fiction to date consists of seven novels and the twenty-three short stories collected in That Distant Land (2004), which, when read as a whole, form a chronicle of the fictional small Kentucky town of Port William. Because of his long-term, ongoing exploration of the life of an imagined place, Berry has been compared to William Faulkner. Yet, although Port William is no stranger to murder, suicide, alcoholism, and the full range of losses that touch human lives, it lacks the extreme delineation of character and plot that characterize much of Faulkner. Hence Berry is sometimes described as working in an idealized, pastoral, or even utopian mode, a characterization of his work he resists. William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American novelist and poet whose works feature his native state of Mississippi. ...

The effect of profound shifts in the agricultural practices of the United States, and the disappearance of traditional agrarian life, are some of the major concerns of the Port William fiction, though the theme is often only a background or subtext to the stories themselves. The Port William fiction attempts to portray, on a local scale, what "a human economy ... conducted with reverence" (The Way of Ignorance, 50) looked like in the past -- and what civic, domestic, and personal virtues might be evoked by such an economy were it pursued today. Social as well as seasonal changes mark the passage of time. Readers of Berry's essays can appreciate that the Port William stories allow the author to explore the human dimensions of the decline of the family farm and farm community, under the influence of expanding post-World War II agribusiness. But these works rarely fall into simple didacticism, and are never merely tales of decline. Each is grounded in an honest depiction of character and community. In A Place on Earth (1967), for example, farmer Mat Feltner comes to terms with the loss of his only son, Virgil. In the course of the novel, we see how not only Mat but the entire community wrestles with the acute costs of World War II. Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000...

Berry's fiction also allows him to explore the literal and metaphorical implications of marriage as that which binds individuals, families, and communities to each other and to Nature itself - yet not all of Port William is happily or conventionally married. "Old Jack" Beechum struggles with significant incompatibilities with his wife, and with a brief yet fulfilling extramarital affair. The barber Jayber Crow lives with a forlorn, secret, and unrequited love for a woman, believing himself "mentally" married to her even though she knows nothing about it. Burley Coulter never formalizes his bond with Kate Helen Branch, the mother of his son. Yet, each of these men find themselves firmly bound up in the community, the "membership," of Port William.

Berry's recent novel, "Hannah Coulter" (2004), is perhaps the preeminent example of Port William "membership." The story encompasses the entire life of Hannah, including the Great Depression, World War II, the post-war industrialization of agriculture, the flight of youth to urban employment, and the consequent remoteness of grandchildren. The tale is told in the voice of an old woman twice widowed, who has experienced almost every other conceivable loss. Yet the beauty and greatness of her life persistently shines through every feature of her reflections. Although she has suffered great loss, she has never been defeated. Somehow, lying at the center of this strength is the "membership" --- the fact that people care for each other and still hold each other in a kind of presence. Along the way we find beautiful concepts, such as "the room of love" and the notion that people can be a "gift" to each other. All in all, "Hannah Coulter" sums up the whole of the Port William saga. In many respects, it is a fictional realization of Berry's "Citizenship Papers" (2001). The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn which started in October of 1929 and lasted through most of the 1930s. ... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000...

Quotations

• "We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it."
• "What I stand for is what I stand on."
• "Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."
• "Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."
• "Eating is an agricultural act."
• "Every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing...Love someone who doesn't deserve it...Plant sequoias...Practice resurrection."
• "There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the American flag when we tolerate, encourage, and as a daily business promote the desecration of the Country for which it stands."
• "The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare -- warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself." --Lindsey Wilson College commencement
• "Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems." Washington Monthly comment forum
• "It maybe when we no longer know what to do, We have come to our real work, And that when we no longer know which way to go, We have begun our real journey."
• "Denounce the Government, Embrace the flag"
• "To be sane in a mad time is bad for the body, worse for the soul"
• "Cheap at any price"

Works

Fiction

• Nathan Coulter, 1960 novel
• A Place on Earth, 1967 novel, revised 1983
• The Memory of Old Jack, 1974 novel
• The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986
• Remembering, 1988 novel
• The Discovery of Kentucky, 1991 story
• Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992
• Watch with Me: And Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994
• A World Lost, 1997 novel
• Two More Stories Of The Port William Membership, 1997
• Jayber Crow, 2000 novel
• Sonata At Payne Hollow, 2001 play
• Three Short Novels: Nathan Coulter; Remembering; A World Lost, 2002
• That Distant Land : The Collected Stories of Wendell Berry, 2004
• Hannah Coulter, 2004 novel
• Andy Catlett : Early Travels, 2006 novel

Nonfiction

• The Hidden Wound, 1970
• The Long-Legged House, 1971
• A Continuous Harmony : Essays Cultural and Agricultural, 1971
• The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge, 1971
• The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1978 essays
• Recollected Essays, 1965-1980, 1981
• The Gift of Good Land; Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural, 1981
• Standing by Words, 1983
• Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship, 1984 editor with Wes Jackson and Bruce Colman
• Home Economics, 1987
• What Are People For?, 1990
• Descendants and Ancestors of Captain James W. Berry, 1990 with Laura Berry
• Standing on Earth, 1991 essays
• What can turn us from this deserted future... , 1991 broadside
• The Discovery of Kentucky, 1991
• Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1992 biography
• Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community : Eight Essays, 1993
• Another Turn of the Crank, 1995 essays
• Three On Community, 1996 essays
• Late Harvest: Rural American Writing, 1996
• Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, 1997 with Mark Dowie and David T. Hanson
• Grace, Photographs of Rural America, 2000 with Gregory Spaid and Gene Logsdon
• Life Is a Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition, 2001
• In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World, 2001
• The Art Of The Commonplace The Agrarian Essays Of Wendell Berry, 2002 edited by Norman Wirzba
• Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership In An Age Of Terror, 2003
• Citizenship Papers, 2003
• Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy by James Baker Hall, Wendell Berry (Contributor), 2004
• The Way of Ignorance, November 2005
• Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings of Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness, November 2005
• The Unforeseen Wilderness : Kentucky's Red River Gorge by Wendell Berry, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, March 2006

Wes Jackson is the founder and current president of the Land Institute. ... Harlan Hubbard (January 4, 1900 - January 16, 1988) was an American artist and author who lived a life that Henry David Thoreau only experimented with. ... James Baker Hall (b. ... Please wikify (format) this article or section as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. ...

Poetry

• November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three, 1964 poem
• The Broken Ground, 1964 poems
• Farming: A Handbook, 1970 poems
• The Country of Marriage, 1973 poems
• Sayings & Doings, 1975 poems
• To What Listens, 1975 poems
• Horses, 1975 chapbook poem
• Kentucky River, Two Poems, 1976
• There is Singing Around Me, 1976 poems
• Clearing, 1977 poems
• Three Memorial Poems, 1977
• The Gift of Gravity, 1979 poems
• A Part, 1980 poems
• The Salad, 1980 chapbook poem
• The Wheel, 1982
• From the Distance, 1982 broadside
• Collected Poems 1957-1982, 1985
• The Wild Rose, 1986 broadside
• The Landscape of Harmony, 1987
• Sabbaths, 1987 poems
• I go from the woods into the cleared field, 1987 broadside poem
• Traveling at Home, 1989 poems
• Sayings & Doings and An Eastward Look, 1990 poems
• The Peace of Wild Things, 1991 poem
• Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, 1994 poem
• Entries: Poems, 1994
• Amish Economy, 1996 poem
• A Timbered Choir:The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997, 1998
• Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1998
• Sabbaths 2002, 2004 chapbook
• Given, 2005 poems

Interviews

• Field Observations: An Interview with Wendell Berry by Jordan Fisher-Smith--[1]
• Sojourners Magazine Interview, July 2004--[2]
• Wendell Berry in: Conversations With Kentucky Writers, L. Elisabeth Beattie (Editor)

Awards

• Guggenheim Fellowship & Rockefeller Fellowships
• Jean Stein Award
• T.S. Eliot Award
• 2000 Poets’ Prize
• Thomas Merton Award, 1999
• Aiken Taylor Award for poetry
• John Hay Award
• Art of Fact Award, 2006 for non-fiction
• Kentuckian of the Year 2006 from Kentucky Monthly, for his writing and his efforts to bring attention to environmental issues in eastern Kentucky.

Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. ... The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) is a charitable organization based in New York City and is the pre-eminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family. ... The Thomas Merton Award has been awarded since 1972 by the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Social Justice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. It is named after Thomas Merton and is given annually to national and international individuals struggling for justice. ... This article should appear in one or more categories. ...

Books about Berry

• Angyal, Andrew. Wendell Berry. New York: Twayne, 1995.
• Goodrich, Janet. The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001.
• Merchant, Paul, ed. Wendell Berry (American Authors Series). Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1991.
• Smith, Kimberly K. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace. Lawrence: U P of Kansas, 2003.

See also

• Agrarianism
• Fellowship of Southern Writers
• Wes Jackson
• The Land Institute
• Wallace Stegner
• Local food

• Wendell Berry at Wikiquote

Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy. ... The Fellowship of Southern Writers is a literary organization headquartered at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. ... Wes Jackson is the founder and current president of the Land Institute. ... The Land Institute works for agriculture to change from annuals grown in large fields of the same plant type to perennials grown as mixed species. ... Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909—April 13, 1993) was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. ... It has been suggested that Local food network be merged into this article or section. ...

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Wendell Berry

• Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky An extensive online collection of links, bibliographies, indexes of poetry titles and first lines, and character lists.
• The Agrarian Standard an essay by Wendell Berry
• The Idea of a Local Economy - Wendell Berry
• "Do Not Be Ashamed" a poem by Wendell Berry
• "Manifesto:The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" a poem by Wendell Berry
• Fellowship of Southern Writers Bio