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. These works are famous for a reason, establishing Berry as a cutthroat critic of the technocratic paradigm, the mentality that treats human beings and the soil as a means to the ends of wealth, efficiency, and a vision of “progress” that always strives towards a vague “something better,” at the cost of the things that make us most human, especially our families and our land. But Berry was not primarily a critic. He was a philosopher and an artist, a farmer and a father. Berry saw these four elements of his life as manifestations of the same calling, a unity of purpose one can see characteristically in his fiction. 

Berry argued that to be rooted in a place is an act of fidelity

Berry argued that to be rooted in a place is an act of........

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