Wendell Berry’s homecoming
From our US edition
Wendell Berry, who died on Monday aged 92, was a man who loved the soil and the soul. Writing from Kentucky, where his family has lived and farmed for generations, Berry built up, over more than sixty years, a corpus of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry – all genres in which he distinguished himself – which, when taken as whole, reveals a profound and coherent philosophy of the earth and how it relates to human community. Unfortunately, the average person probably doesn’t know who Berry is. Even those who have heard of him might only know his incendiary 1987 Harper’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” or his watershed 1977 takedown of maximalist agricultural practices, The Unsettling of America.
