Wendell Berry

Berry conversing with visitors at his home in Henry County, Kentucky.

Many readers come away from Wendell Berry’s agrarian books and set about changing their lives. (On a personal note, reading Berry played a huge role in my moving from Washington, D.C., to a farm in Kentucky.) Yet it would be a mistake, Berry says, to think of him as someone who has all the answers. He sees himself not as a prophet, but as an engaged member of his Henry County, Kentucky community. When he isn’t writing or reading, he might be working with his team of draft horses, caring for his flock of sheep, protesting the destructive practices of the coal industry, or working with friends and allies in an effort to influence agricultural policy.

Following the lead of his former teacher Wallace Stegner, Berry has pointed out that we’ve got two strains in American history: one of “boomers,” the other of “stickers.” The boomer lights on a place to make a killing, to get out of it as much as can be got, and then leave. The sticker, by contrast, shares a common cause with a piece of land. Kentucky literature is rife with stories of stickers— James Still’s River of Earth and Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker, for instance— but most of American literature is preoccupied with boomers, whose unsettled lives readily lend themselves to dramatization.

It is affection, ultimately, that has made Berry a sticker. He doesn’t always agree with his neighbors, but, he says, “the experience of loving people you don’t agree with is very instructive.”   

Berry in two chairs, binoculars near at hand.