Wendell Berry: An American Treasure

Wendell Berry is probably not a household name. Yet he ranks easily in the top ten most important American writers along with the likes of William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. As of this writing he is still actively writing at the age of 89 from his farm in rural Kentucky. Wendell Berry will be the subject of the first installment in our Authors You Should Know series.

Born in 1934 in rural Kentucky into a fifth generation farming family, Berry has become an accomplished novelist, poet, essayist, activist, and cultural critic. Yet likely his favorite work is continuing the family business as a farmer. What’s interesting about Wendell Berry is that all of interests come together in his writings. He is most well known for his series of novels set in the fictional town of Port William, KY. These novels serve as a snapshot that show the reader how life has changed over time for rural communities all throughout the country.

In addition to his novels, Berry is also known for his poetry and essays. Many of his poems and essays serve as cultural critiques about agriculture, climate change, workers right, politics, and racism, among other topics. Wendell Berry can be an enigma, yet he is a wealth of insight into the past and a guide to a sustainable future for American society. His critiques of society do not come from a place of resentment, but come across as a loving grandfather teaching the next generation what it will take to succeed.

What is most interesting about Wendell Berry is that he does all of his writing the old fashioned way with pencil and paper. He is not the only writer who wrote that way. Both C. S. Lewis and American historian Shelby Foote wrote using an ink well pen and paper. For them there was something about having to pause and dip the pen into the ink that helped them think about what they wanted to write next. Berry makes much the same argument in his essay Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987).

Readers of Berry’s works sense a deep longing that underlies much of his writings. Much of what Berry laments about society finds its answer in the gospel. A person can have a slower pace of life, live on a farm, and be less dependent on technology. Yet that person can still not be fully satisfied with their life, because real satisfaction only comes from Jesus through the gospel. It is through the gospel that we find real community with our Savior and new family, the local church. A civic community can only meet a finite number of our needs, and imperfectly at that. Only Jesus meets all our needs perfectly. Readers must allow the gospel to satisfy the longing that underlies much of Berry’s writings.

For the reader looking to dive into the world of Wendell Berry, a good place to start is his novels. They too serve as a form of cultural critique, but in a more subtle way. He pulls the reader into the story of Port William, and you feel like you are walking the streets along with the characters. You almost come to feel as though you know them as part of your own family’s story. My favorite is Jayber Crow, but other good ones to start with are Hannah Coulter and Andy Catlett: Early Travels.

What follows is a brief list of recommended reading from the Wendell Berry collection:

• The Unsettling of America (1977)
• Jayber Crow (2000)
• The Hidden Wound (2010)
• A Place in Time (2013)
• The Peace of Wild Things (2018)
• New Collected Poems (2013)
• The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (2017)
• The Art of Loading Brush (2017)
• The Need To Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (2022)
• How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership (2022)

Photo credit: The Abbeville Institute

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