A working farmer, conservationist, and man of letters, Wendell Berry is respected by members of both the American Right and Left for his accomplishment in promoting the recurrent themes of his written work: the timelessness and practicality of recognizing and living out the interconnectedness between faith, family, the small community, and the land. As a localist and believer in small-scale sustainable economies, he is a humanistic writer working firmly in the tradition of the Agrarians; but where the original Agrarians of the early 1930s—with the exception of Andrew Lytle—merely wrote about the importance of sustaining agricultural life in the American South, Berry actually lives the agrarian life, farming ancestral land near Port Royal, Kentucky. Recognizing the land itself as a trust linking the dead, the living, and those yet unborn, he perceives his life’s work as that of being a responsible steward of the soil and a responsible member of the small community of souls of which he is a part.

Berry holds that while the subsistence farmer in general is down-to-earth and practical, he is no materialist; he is a nurturer of the soil (and, by extension, the soul), not an exploiter who takes what he can from the land in terms of lumber, crops, and soil quality, and then sells his depleted property to the highest bidder—perhaps to be transformed into a new housing development. Berry thus stands at odds with those conservatives who view the acquisition of wealth, often through unceasing land development, as the end of life. (At the same time, his agrarian philosophy sits uncomfortably with some leftists/liberals, who are suspicious of Berry’s emphasis on the importance of faith in God, the strong need for rootedness and place, and community reliance, as opposed to government regulations and scientistic solutions to life’s challenges.) Berry’s farming methods are as radical as his cultural criticism: he uses mule-power and other natural methods in farming, eschewing computers, chemical fertilizers, expensive machinery, and the other accoutrements of contemporary “agribusiness,” which he detests. In choosing such a course, Berry believes that he better preserves the dance-like rhythm of the seasons and weather: the annual birth, ascent, decline, death, and rebirth of creation.

During the few hours every day when he is not working the land, Berry writes. As a craftsman of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, he enjoys a growing and passionately enthusiastic following. Such nonfiction works as The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), What Are People For? (1990), and Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays (1993), as well as such novels as Nathan Coulter (1960) and Jayber Crow (2000), make it clear that Berry is not only contemporary America’s most important agrarian thinker but also a serious proponent of an alternative vision of cultural conservatism.

Further Reading

Andrew J. Angyal, Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

Allan Carlson, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

Daniel Cornell, “The Country of Marriage: Wendell Berry’s Personal Political Vision,” Southern Literary Journal

Kimberly K. Smith, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace

This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, p. 69.