Wendell Berry Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

12 Quotes
Occup.	Poet
From	USA
Born	August 5, 1934 Henry County, Kentucky
Age	91 years

Early Life and Education
Wendell Berry was born in 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky, and grew up along the ridges and bends of the Kentucky River. The small farms, tobacco barns, and mixed woodlands of that landscape marked him early, giving him the vocabulary of place that would anchor his poetry, fiction, and essays. He studied at the University of Kentucky, earning a BA and MA in the 1950s, and married Tanya Amyx in 1957. Tanya Berry's steady presence, practical wisdom, and editorial eye became foundational to his life and work, and their partnership would remain one of the constants in a career defined by devotion to family, farm, and community.

Apprenticeship and Early Career
In 1958, 1959 Berry held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Under the tutelage of Wallace Stegner he refined his craft and absorbed a vision of writing built on observation, moral clarity, and fidelity to the particulars of a place. The Stanford community of that period included emerging writers such as Ken Kesey, and the experience gave Berry a view of American letters that was both expansive and rigorously local in its demands. He published his first novel, Nathan Coulter, in 1960 and began to define the voice that would make him one of the most distinctive American writers of his generation.

Return to Kentucky and the Making of a Farmer-Writer
After teaching and traveling in the early 1960s, Berry and Tanya returned to Kentucky in 1965 and settled near Port Royal on Lanes Landing Farm. There, while raising a family and tending fields, he chose the discipline of small-scale, diversified agriculture, often working with draft animals and hand tools. The rhythms of planting, harvest, and Sabbath walks became the ground of his imagination. His life as a farmer-writer was not a posture but a daily practice, a way of testing ideas about soil, memory, and responsibility against the stubborn facts of weather and work.

Port William and the Fiction of Membership
Berry's fictional town of Port William, modeled on the communities of his native Henry County, became the setting for a lifelong narrative project he called the "membership". Through novels and stories such as A Place on Earth, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, Fidelity, Watch with Me, and Remembering, he drew a many-voiced portrait of neighbors bound by land, kinship, and work. The characters' lives are braided across decades, and their losses, of soil, of skills, of young people to distant economies, mirror the larger American story of industrialization and dislocation. The membership is Berry's counter-argument: a vision of human limits honored and of affection as a practical, communal force.

Poetry: The Mad Farmer and the Sabbath Poems
As a poet, Berry is known for an apparently plain style that hides great formal care. The persona of the "Mad Farmer", introduced in poems such as The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, speaks with prophetic wit against the delusions of endless growth and the forgetting of place. Beginning in the 1970s he composed his Sabbath poems during Sunday walks on his farm; many appear in volumes such as A Timbered Choir, Given, and Leavings. These poems return to recurring themes, delight in creation, grief for what is squandered, and the possibility of peace in work rightly done, while insisting on the moral reality of local landscapes.

Essays and Public Argument
Berry's essays secured his reputation as one of the country's most forceful agrarian thinkers. In The Unsettling of America he criticized the industrialization of agriculture as an assault on both land and people. The Hidden Wound confronted the enduring damage of racism and slavery's legacy in his own place. Collections including The Gift of Good Land, Home Economics, What Are People For?, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, Life Is a Miracle, and Citizenship Papers extend his argument that economy is inescapably ecological and moral. With plant geneticist and prairie ecologist Wes Jackson, he advanced proposals for long-term agricultural reform, notably the "50-Year Farm Bill", and championed perennial polycultures, soil conservation, and local food economies. Their friendship joined Berry's literary voice to Jackson's scientific vision, and together they modeled a cooperative way of thinking across disciplines.

Allies, Mentors, and Kindred Spirits
Throughout his career, certain people shaped and sustained Berry's work. Wallace Stegner's mentoring at Stanford gave him an early standard of craft and integrity. Harlan and Anna Hubbard, whom Berry visited and wrote about in Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, embodied a patient, frugal artistry and river-bound self-reliance that deepened his sense of limits and freedom. In publishing, editor Jack Shoemaker championed Berry's books over decades, first at North Point Press and later at Counterpoint, helping keep a large and coherent body of work continuously available. Within his family, Tanya Berry's collaboration, often quiet but decisive, has been repeatedly acknowledged by Berry as essential. Their daughter Mary Berry extended the family's public service by founding and directing The Berry Center in Kentucky, an organization dedicated to sustaining small farms, soil-conserving agriculture, and the rural communities Berry's writing has defended.

Teaching, Advocacy, and Public Witness
Berry taught writing at the University of Kentucky and influenced younger writers by insisting that literary skill is inseparable from an ethic of attention and care. Beyond the classroom he became a visible advocate for land and people: opposing strip mining and mountaintop removal in Appalachia; supporting local markets for small farmers; and urging universities and governments to align their policies with the health of watersheds and towns. In 2009 he withdrew his papers from the University of Kentucky in protest of the institution's ties to the coal industry, and in 2011 he joined a sit-in at the Kentucky governor's office to call attention to the human and ecological costs of mountaintop removal mining. His public stance has been firm but courteous, grounded in the conviction that affection for place is a practical politics.

Recognition and Later Work
National recognition followed his persistent, place-rooted labor. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and in 2012 delivered the NEH Jefferson Lecture, "It All Turns on Affection", a summation of his belief that good economies begin in particular loves, of people, of fields and streams, of towns remembered into responsibility. He continued to publish poetry, stories, and essays into his later years, including meditations on history, race, and belonging, while maintaining the small habits of daily stewardship on his farm.

Legacy
Wendell Berry's legacy is not only literary; it is practical and communal. His novels make an imagined town feel as durable as memory; his poems give readers a way to stand still and see; his essays argue that culture and agriculture are one word at the root. Around him stand the people who formed that work, Tanya Berry at the center of the household and farm; mentors like Wallace Stegner; collaborators such as Wes Jackson; friends and exemplars Harlan and Anna Hubbard; an editor, Jack Shoemaker, devoted to careful bookmaking; and a daughter, Mary Berry, carrying the work forward through The Berry Center. Together they form a human context for a writer who has spent a lifetime insisting that context, of family, place, and membership, is where meaning begins.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Wendell, under the main topics: Wisdom - Justice - Nature - Perseverance - Contentment.

Wendell Berry Famous Works