Kentucky writer and conservationist Wendell Berry once wrote: “Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.”
A lover of forests, the farmer, author and former English professor died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, according to the New York Times and other media reports. He was 92.
Born in 1934 to Virginia Erdman and attorney John Marshall Berry, Wendell Berry was a prolific writer of nonfiction, poetry and fiction from Henry County, Kentucky.
In dozens of books he wrote of the need to protect — and ethically use — land, of God as a part of nature and of modernity as a force to be rebelled against.
Berry was a member of a group of Kentucky writers called the “Fab Five,” which included Bobbie Ann Mason and the late Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall and Ed McClanahan.
He leaves behind a sprawling legacy of advocacy, conservationism, literary pursuit and protest that inspired people from the hills of Kentucky to Hollywood and beyond.
His death leaves a vacancy of voice that was not always without controversy throughout his life but was decisive and steady throughout a long career.
Tobacco and love of land
Berry came from a long line of tobacco producers. John M. Berry, Wendell Berry’s father, co-founded the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-Op in the 1920s, which stabilized the price of tobacco and helped farmers who’d been subject to the pricing impulses of the monopoly American Tobacco Company, according to a Bitter Southerner article.
“The brilliance of the program was that it successfully matched supply and demand, preventing farmers from falling victim to overproduction,” the Bitter Southerner article says. “Within this equilibrium, farmers in the co-op were guaranteed parity prices, which meant a price that compensated them for all of their inputs.”
That article also quoted Mary Berry, daughter of Wendell Berry, as saying the co-op “was the only farm program that I know of that served the people it was supposed to serve, and that was small farmers. It was never a subsidy, it was a price support. It cost the government nothing.”
His family farmed in Henry County for generations. In a 1987 interview with the Kentucky Historical Society, Berry’s father said his great-grandfather bought 500 acres of land in the county after serving in the Army in the War of 1812.
When Berry left New York City and returned home to Kentucky for good in the 1960s, he did so with “some fear and trembling, but also a sense of doing the right thing,” he told The New Yorker in 2019.
When he started the trek home, with all his belongings in a Volkswagen Beetle, he told the New Yorker: “I felt a great, deep relief — as if I was following, at last, my true path.”
‘Cheerful in dissent.’
Berry was a man of many lanes.
He protested the Vietnam War, saying in 1968 that “peace is more important than victory,” according to a Messenger Inquirer article from Feb. 11 of that year.
Berry was arrested in 1979 for trespassing as he protested the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant in Madison, Indiana. In a 2010 CounterPunch conversation, he said of that day: “People asked if I wanted to be arrested and I said, ‘Hell No’ but I was willing to be.”
In 2009, Berry joined thousands of people who marched in protest of the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., Inside Climate News reported at the time, in an effort to fight for cleaner emissions.
He echoed the same trepidation and resolve about the prospect of arrest: “Somebody asked me if I wanted to get arrested. The answer is very brief: No. But I’m willing to get arrested. Nothing else is working.”
The farmer fought to preserve a controversial piece of University of Kentucky art condemned as racist for many years and pushed back against mountaintop removal by joining a sit-in at former Gov. Steve Beshear’s office in 2011.
The National Endowment for the Humanities described him in 2012 as “cheerful in dissent” and a person who “writes to document and defend what is being lost to the forces of modernization, and to explain how he lives and what he thinks.”
The Berry Center was established in 2011 to put “Wendell Berry’s writings to work by advocating for farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies.”
The nonprofit works to bring “focus, knowledge and cohesion to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agricultural system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities.”
The center educates farmers “in agrarian thought and practice,” runs a bookstore, has a cooperative to help farmers sell to markets and more.
The work is in line with Berry’s legacy of advocacy for land preservation and agrarian life.
Berry and the University of Kentucky
Berry had a complicated relationship with his alma mater, the University of Kentucky.
He earned his bachelor and master’s degrees in English from UK, according to the Kentucky Historical Society. He then taught at the University of Kentucky from 1964-1977 and again from 1987-1993. (His teaching roster also includes Stanford University, Georgetown College, New York University, the University of Cincinnati and Bucknell University).
In late 2009, Berry withdrew papers he’d loaned UK, a quiet protest against the university’s acceptance of $7 million from coal producer and philanthropist Joe Craft to rename a residence hall the “Wildcat Coal Lodge.”
The Kentucky Kernel, the independent student newspaper at UK, reported that Berry could not abide what he considered an indignity as an advocate for the land and water polluted by mining.
“I was taught that taking care of land was one of the primary human responsibilities,” the Kernel quoted Berry as saying. “In the long run, the top soil, the forests and the woodland of this state will be more valuable than the coal deposits.”
Berry felt the university’s move was a split from his values and those held by other farmers.
“When the university accepted the gift from (the) coal industry in return for naming the basketball dormitory ‘Wildcat Coal Lodge,’ the university had sold an advertisement,” Berry said, according to the Kernel.
That wasn’t the only time Berry and UK clashed.
In July 2020, Berry joined a lawsuit against the University of Kentucky seeking to preserve a controversial 1934 fresco mural many criticised for its depictions of slavery in America and of Indigenous people.
Ann Rice O’Hanlon painted the fresco as part of the Public Works of Art Project and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
It was a site for protests on campus and requests to have it removed for years. According to court documents, complaints began in the 1970s.
University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto agreed to cover the mural in 2019 following a sit-in protest on campus that included the Black Student Advisory Council and others. In June 2020, seemingly moved by the racial justice movement sweeping through the country, he announced the university would remove it.
The next month, Berry stepped in and asked a court to halt the removal. In court documents from the time, Berry argued the art needed to be conserved because of its historical significance, difficulty to create and rarity, being one of around 42 frescos from the time.
“The O’Hanlon Mural is a figurative representation of the history of Lexington and Central Kentucky,” Berry’s petition read.
He wrote of her “artistic choices that abstract the essential truths of the art as opposed to mere representation,” which he said “is part of what makes the O’Hanlon Mural unique and a valuable piece of the cultural assets of Kentucky held in trust by the University.”
The Lexington Herald-Leader reported in January 2026 that the mural remains in its place on campus.
‘Radical and eclectic’
The late bell hooks, a renowned Kentucky author known for her many writings on feminist theory, racism and love, among other topics, wrote fondly of Berry in “belonging: a culture of place,” one of some 40 books she published throughout her career.
She praised him for the “wide range of issues in his essays that were fundamentally radical and eclectic.” She taught at Berea College from his book about race, “The Hidden Wound.”
Berry also inspired actor and writer Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation fame. Offerman, himself an outdoorsman, has narrated several of Berry’s books for audiobook format, including his magnum opus, “The Unsettling of America.”
In a 2020 interview with Literary Hub, Offerman said in Berry he “unexpectedly found a chronicler of the nobility found in good, honest work, and thrift, and affection for one’s family and neighbors and animals and the land that supports and nourishes all of the above.”
“I have often asserted that if my job were simply to broadcast the works of Wendell Berry to the world, I’d die a happy man,” Offerman said in that interview.
Honors
Former President Barack Obama awarded Berry with the 2010 National Humanities Medal for his work as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist.
He also earned other notable honors, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, according to the Poetry Foundation.
In 1961, he traveled in France and Italy as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prestigious honor for “exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form under the freest possible conditions.” The Fellowship has gone to other notable writers including Ada Limón, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado and Sigrid Nunez.
His slew of other honors include the Kentucky Libraries Award’ for Intellectual Excellence, the Thomas Merton Award, The Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion from The American Academy of Religion, the Poets’ Prize and others.
For a list of Berry’s books, visit this site.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete at this time.
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Linda Blackford for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.
Sarah Ladd is a Louisville-based journalist and Kentuckian. She has covered everything from crime to higher education. In 2020, she started reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic and has covered health ever since.
