Wendell Berry, Kentucky author who championed a simpler life, dies at 92

Wendell Berry spent his life writing against the idea that more consumption automatically brings a better life. The Kentucky-born author and agrarian, who celebrated farming communities and warned about industrial society’s excesses, died at 92 in his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.

His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed his death. “There's not enough I could say about him to do him justice,” she told The Associated Press.

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There's not enough I could say about him to do him justice.

Few writers were as closely tied to a place as Berry was to Kentucky. He grew up in a farming town during the Great Depression and watched the community’s long-standing connections begin to unravel by the time he was a teenager. That experience shaped a body of work that treated birth, love, work and death as subjects of deep mystery rather than material for easy explanation.

Berry’s poems, stories, novels and essays questioned modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness. In his 2006 novel “Andy Catlett: Early Travels,” he wrote that the older world, in which people lived by the work of their hands and remained close to weather, soil, plants and animals, was the “true world.” He contrasted it with a newer society built on cheap energy, cheap money, greed and freedom from restraint, which he called “mostly theater.”

He published more than 40 books, including “Nathan Coulter,” “A Place on Earth,” “A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997” and the farming manifesto “The Unsettling of America.” In that 1977 book, he attacked the consolidation and mechanization of agriculture as violations of the natural order of both land and spirit.

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The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic.

Berry’s influence reached well beyond Kentucky. Michael Pollan said Berry changed his life with the declaration that “Eating is an agricultural act.” Chef and food activist Alice Waters named him a favorite author and introduced a 1989 essay on the pleasures of eating.

He became one of the most prominent American authors never to win a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award. 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.

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Eating is an agricultural act.