Author challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness
Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born writer and agrarian who in poems, novels, stories, and essays celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned against the excesses of an industrial, commercialized society, died Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92.
His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed the death to The Associated Press on Monday, saying “there’s not enough I could say about him to do him justice.”
Berry was an intellectual and spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau and to such Southern agrarians as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. Few authors were more closely identified with their home state.
In prose and poetry that mirrored the uncluttered and deeply felt life he advocated, Berry challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness and renewed the mysteries of birth, love, work and death.
The writer drew his material from his own history. He was born and raised in a farming town during the Great Depression and watched its seemingly immortal rural ties unravel by his teens. The unraveling of those childhood ties shaped his body of work, which celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned against the excesses of an industrial, commercialized society.
Berry’s death was first reported by The Associated Press.