Wendell Berry: The Passing of an Authentic American Original

I am holding a copy of "The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture" by Wendell Berry, which I acquired almost four decades ago, in 1987. It was the first book that awakened me, and I am sure many Americans, to the looming disaster of losing contact with nature and to the way technology would infiltrate every aspect of our lives, potentially robbing us of our humanity and leaving us gasping for meaning and purpose. “I’ve been farming for over 40 years, and I’ve come to realize the importance in keeping traditional values & strong community ties,” wrote Berry. “We should not be so quick to trust technology but rather hold on to our agrarian values.”

Wendell Berry's passing on 31 August 2026 at age 92 marks the end of an American original. A novelist, poet, essayist, activist, and farmer, he was less well known to the public than two other icons who also recently left us, Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem. Yet his unwavering loyalty to his conscience and community, as reflected in the full life he led as a husband, a writer, and a farmer, will inspire generations who read him and reflect on his work.

Berry exhorted us to value the natural and the genuine over the artificial and the contrived. (In this, he belongs to a group that includes Henry David Thoreau, E. B. White, and Loren Eiseley). He distinguished the nurturer from the exploiter: “The exploiter serves an institution or organization,” he wrote in The Unsettling of America, “the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, ‘hard facts,’ the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality.” He regarded the ecological crisis, now called climate change, as a crisis of character. He believed the disease of modern character was specialization, which produced specialists elaborately and expensively trained to do just one thing. Thus we have “educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, and doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases they have no interest in preventing.”

Berry’s books and essays may come across as uncompromising in their indictment of our lifestyles, priorities, and politics, but he never flinched from writing what he believed to be the truth. He practiced what he preached, giving up prestigious writing and teaching positions at elite universities to make a living as a farmer on his Lane’s Landing homestead in Henry County, Kentucky, and to write.

And write he did, over fifty books of poems, essays, novels, and short story collections. I devoured his fiction, many set in the fictional Port William, Kentucky, such as The Memory of Old Jack, Nathan Coulter, Hannah Coulter, Remembering, A Place on Earth, and, in my opinion, the most moving and powerful of all, Jayber Crow, short story collections like Fidelity, The Wild Birds, A Place in Time, and essay collections such as The Gift of Good Land, The Long-Legged House, The Art of the Common Place, What Are People For, A Continuous Harmony, The Hidden Wound, Standing By Words, Home Economics, Citizenship Papers, Our Only World, and of course, The Unsettling of America.

In 2008, a member of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize for Literature, caused a furor when he explained with righteous authority why American writers had been coming up empty for several years in the Nobel Prize race. “American literature is second-rate,” said the judge, arguing that American writers were too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture, which dragged down their quality. “They don’t participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

I remember thinking at the time: Has the judge, or any of his colleagues, ever read Wendell Berry? If they had, they would have discovered a unique voice that, through masterpieces like Jayber Crow, not only engaged in the “big dialogue of literature” but also extended its boundaries.

(For the record, American Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 and Louise Glück in 2020.)

The truth is, Wendell Berry transcended awards and honors. He wrote what he believed, using language both lyrical and fierce, pointing to a sustainable yet adventurous life. One way we can honor Wendell Berry’s legacy is to read his writings, promote his books in book clubs sprouting across America, and engage in lively discussions about what makes his writing timeless.

As a Muslim, I was surprised and thrilled to read a foreword by Wendell Berry to the book “My Mercy Encompasses All” by an Islamic scholar named Reza-Shah Kazmi, published in 2007. Berry felt that Christians and Muslims may be divided into two groups: “those who appoint themselves as agents of divine anger and those who understand themselves as called to be agents of divine mercy … To think of oneself as an agent of God’s anger is exceedingly attractive … There are certain intense pleasures in anger, especially if one’s own anger can be presumed to coincide with God’s, and also in the use of an angry self-righteousness as a standard by which to condemn other people. This is pleasure necessarily founded on the shallowest sort of self-knowledge … To take up, by contrast, the agency of God’s mercy seems to involve one in a labor of self-knowledge and then knowledge of others that is endlessly humbling … We ourselves are in need of those things we are called upon to give to others: compassion, forgiveness, mercy. And unless we give them, we cannot receive them … Those who accept the agency of God’s mercy, understanding their own need for it as the index of the need of others, must forbear their anger and talk together until the end of time, for God’s mercy is a mystery never to be fully known or enacted by humans.”

I re-read his books every now and then because Wendell Berry fills me with the hope that a better life is possible if we get off the treadmill of wanting more and more, focus on community and compassion rather than on self and fame, and pursue work that aligns with our values rather than where the money is.