Throwback Thursday: Remembering wordsmith Wendell Berry
On August 31, Kentucky lost one of its most important voices, a man who became known around the world, while spending most of his life writing about the importance of staying close to home. Wendell Berry passed away at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92 years old. Born in 1934, Berry grew up in Henry County in a family with generations of ties to Kentucky agriculture. He earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Kentucky, then left home for opportunities most young writers could only dream about. He studied at Stanford under legendary writer Wallace Stegner, alongside future literary giants including Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and Ernest Gaines. A Guggenheim fellowship took him to Europe, and he later taught at New York University.
In 1964 though, Wendell Berry did something that would define the rest of his life. He came home to Kentucky. Berry and his wife, Tanya, settled on a farm near Port Royal overlooking the Kentucky River. There he farmed, raised sheep, worked with horses, and wrote. Over the next 60 years, Berry produced more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His fictional Kentucky community of Port William became the setting for generations of interconnected stories about farmers, families, neighbors, loss, and belonging. His 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, became a landmark critique of industrial agriculture. And poems like The Peace of Wild Things reached readers far beyond the farm.
Berry argued that how we treat the land, our neighbors and our communities are not separate questions. They are the same. That philosophy made this Kentucky farmer an internationally influential thinker on agriculture, conservation, and community. President Obama presented Berry with the National Humanities Medal, and in 2012 Berry delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. He later became the first living writer inducted into the Kentucky Writer’s Hall of Fame, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the National Book Critics Circle’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Berry’s story reaches Bowling Green, too. Western Kentucky University awarded him an honorary degree, and in 1982 Berry came to WKU to speak. Decades later, his writing continues to be taught and discussed on the Hill, fitting for a writer whose life’s work asked Kentuckians to think deeply about place, community, and what we choose to preserve.
Berry was also an activist. He protested strip mining and mountaintop removal, defended small farmers, and challenged institutions, sometimes including his own alma mater, when he believed economic progress came at too great a cost to land or community. Despite international recognition, he remained remarkably rooted in the same Kentucky landscape that inspired his work. Wendell Berry spent a lifetime reminding us that a place isn’t merely somewhere we live. It’s something entrusted to us.
That’s why this Kentucky farmer’s words traveled so much farther than he ever needed to. Throwback Thursday is brought to you by the Kentucky Museum. In Bowling Green, because local matters, Telia Butler, WNKY News 40.
