Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and conservationist known worldwide through his novels, poems and essays, died Monday at his home in Henry County. He was 92.
In 1999, during the 53rd annual meeting of Kentucky’s electric cooperatives, Berry was named Distinguished Rural Kentuckian—the highest honor bestowed by the association.
“I am a rural Kentuckian by fate and by choice,” he said during the meeting, “and I have enormous debts to other rural Kentuckians, dead and alive. And in all my work, I’ve tried to remember and pay respect to them.”
A video tribute produced in 1999 by the Kentucky Association of Electric Cooperatives presents Berry, a Shelby Energy consumer-member since 1965, as someone uniquely suited to the distinction: a working Kentucky farmer whose poetry, fiction and essays chronicled the struggles and enduring value of small farms and rural communities.
“I had been fairly confident that these unleavened compliments might be reserved for my funeral, and I’ve had to pinch myself a number of times,” Berry told the audience, after viewing the tribute. “I’m deeply grateful to be honored by this cooperative of cooperatives. A cooperative is a grand idea, and I’m glad to see that this one is thriving.”
The video traces Berry’s life from his 1934 birth into a Henry County farm family through the experiences that shaped his commitment to literature, agriculture and rural life. He credits his mother, Virginia, with instilling in him a love of books and his father, John M. Berry, with teaching him to observe the quality of crops, animals, pastures and work while valuing rural life for its own sake.
After studying at the University of Kentucky, marrying Tanya Amyx and pursuing fellowships and teaching opportunities in California, Italy and New York, Berry returned home to Kentucky in 1964. In Port Royal, he resumed farming, taught at the University of Kentucky and built a life in which his family, his land and his writing became inseparable.
Friends, colleagues and admirers interviewed for the film praised the discipline of his writing and the breadth of his influence, portraying him as one of Kentucky’s most important voices on agriculture, culture and the environment. The tribute also surveys his literary achievement, beginning with Nathan Coulter in 1960 and noting that by 1999 he had written more than 40 books of fiction, essays and poetry.
“I would say that much of his writing is more down to earth, is more appealing, has more substance, than the writings of Thoreau,” said Thomas D. Clark, the eminent Kentucky historian and 1994 Distinguished Rural Kentuckian. “It is Thoreau brought up to date, in many respects.”
David Dick, Kentucky Living’s longtime back page columnist and 2003 Distinguished Rural Kentuckian, stood in awe of the quality and quantity of Berry’s literary output, which would continue for nearly three more decades, eventually numbering more than 50 books, according to the Poetry Foundation.
“I believe that Wendell Berry is an example of the disciplined, committed writer,” Dick said. “Because these words don’t fall out of the sky. … It requires working very hard, every day—just as good farming requires working hard every day.”
Ashley Chilton, a longtime Shelby Energy board member who died in June, praised Berry as a farmer and conservationist.
“Wendell practices what he preaches,” Chilton said. “He lives the life. As an author, he’s very outstanding in his field, and as a farmer, last week, I personally saw him out standing in his field.”
The keynote speaker for the 1999 annual meeting banquet was Hugh Sidey, a Time magazine correspondent. Sidey didn’t know until his arrival that he would get to meet Berry, a writer he admired.
“The fact is that I have spent my adult life writing about people of power and authority and great wealth,” he told the annual meeting audience. “And I guess that I could count on my fingers the number of those people that I consider truly great.
“But I have felt that Wendell Berry, because I have read his prose and I’ve heard others talk about him and his poetry, was a truly great man who honored his people, his heritage, his land, his state, and everything. And this is really such a tremendous honor for me to be here, to know these people.”
According to his obituary in the New York Times, Berry received more than 30 awards, including the 2010 National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2011 by President Barack Obama, The Sewanee Review’s Allen Tate Poetry Prize in 2014 and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, given by the National Book Critics Circle in 2016.
View the full video of the 1999 annual meeting banquet here: https://youtu.be/BHuZQNPM0fE?si=8FV-fLYdKLeArtV6
