Why this literary giant abandoned New York City to become a small-scale farmer
In short: He was a creative writing fellow at Stanford and a professor at NYU, yet Wendell Berry walked away from the literary capital of the universe. He returned to rural Kentucky to prove that the arrangement of a farm is as vital as the arrangement of a novel.
Wendell Berry’s life was defined by a refusal to specialize. While many writers of his era committed to narrow niches, Berry functioned simultaneously as a novelist, poet, essayist, naturalist, and small farmer. This multifaceted identity was rooted in his upbringing in Kentucky, where his father, a lawyer and tobacco farmer, instilled in him a respect for precise language and the importance of calling things by their right names.
His literary career took him from the University of Kentucky to Stanford University, where he studied under Wallace Stegner alongside peers like Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry. After a Guggenheim fellowship in Italy and a teaching stint at New York University, Berry made the pivotal decision in 1977 to leave academia and the city. He returned to his roots to focus on farming and writing, a move that many of his literary contemporaries found baffling.
This return informed his most significant works, such as the 1977 nonfiction classic, The Unsettling of America. In it, he critiqued the rise of industrial agribusiness, defending instead the stability of small family farms. His work often bridges the gap between the physical and the philosophical; he famously compared the integration of crops and animals on an acre of land to the structural demands of composing a novel, noting that proper order in farming leads to the miracle of sustainability.
Beyond the page, Berry was a dedicated activist. He used his writing to protest the Vietnam War and to fight the damming of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. His commitment to his principles even led to acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, such as his 1979 protest against a nuclear power plant construction in Indiana.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Wendell Berry | Biography, Poems, Books, The Peace of Wild Things, Death, Port William, & Facts | Britannica
- Also: Wendell Berry
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