Wendell Berry, a Kentucky-born author who wrote novels and poems that championed small-farm residents, died on Monday. He was 92.
Berry died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, his daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed to The New York Times.
Berry published more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction and arguments that not only featured small family farms, but also the environment, local foods and independent communities. His targets included chemicals, agribusiness and most modern technologies, according to the newspaper.
Many of his works were written mostly in pencil and without electric light.
Berry was known for his novels, including “Jayber Crow,” “Hannah Coulter” and “The Memory of Old Jack,” WLKY reported.
President Barack Obama awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal in 2010, according to the television station.
“Wendell Berry has passed. Another great light gone out,” former Kentucky poet laureate Silas House wrote in a Facebook post. “There are so many ways he influenced me but most of all what I keep thinking is that he was so good to me. Generous with his time and words. Complex. Brilliant. Revolutionary,” House said in a post on Facebook.
Berry was once praised by author-historian Page Smith as “a prophetic American voice of our day.” His detractors compared his criticisms to those of Henry David Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson, the Times reported.
Berry first won national attention with his 1977 work, “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture” (1977). The book launched the modern movement for sustainable farming and became a conservationist classic, according to the newspaper.
In a statement, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear called Berry “a great Kentuckian and literary giant.”
“His writing reminded us to live simply and to love our neighbors,” Beshear wrote on X.
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