Author Wendell Berry died Monday August 31 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. His daughter Mary Berry confirmed his death to the New York Times. No cause was given.
Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky in 1934 into a farming family and never truly left, not in any way that mattered.
He studied and taught English at the University of Kentucky, spent a brief period in New York and California and came back to Port Royal in 1965 to farm the land his family had always farmed.
He grew grain and raised sheep on Lane's Landing Farm for more than 40 years while writing poetry, essays and fiction that made the case, quietly, persistently and from firsthand experience, that the land is not a resource to be exploited but a community to belong to.
His more than 50 published works include The Unsettling of America, his 1977 argument against industrial agriculture and the forces destroying rural community; Hannah Coulter, the 2004 novel about a Kentucky farm widow that is perhaps his most beloved fiction; and A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems.
He received the National Humanities Medal in 2010. He was arrested in 2011 for sitting in at the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop removal mining.
He wrote his own epitaph in advance: "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."
He did not withhold himself from anything, either.