Wendell Berry



Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934 Henry County, Kentucky) is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is also an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a recipient of The National Humanities Medal.

Life
Berry is the first of four children born to John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer in Henry County, and Virginia Erdman Berry. The families of both of his parents have farmed in Henry County for at least five generations. Berry attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute, then earned a B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky, where in 1956 he met another Kentucky writer-to-be, Gurney Norman. In 1957, he completed his M.A. and married Tanya Amyx. In 1958, he attended Stanford University's creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, studying under Stegner in a seminar that included Edward Abbey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen, and Ken Kesey. Berry's first novel, Nathan Coulter, was published in April 1960. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship took Berry and his family to Italy and France in 1961, where he came to know Wallace Fowlie, critic and translator of French literature. From 1962 to 1964, he taught English at New York University's University College in the Bronx. In 1964, he began teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, from which he resigned in 1977. During this time in Lexington, he came to know author Guy Davenport, as well as author Thomas Merton and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

In 1965, Berry moved to a farm he had purchased, Lane's Landing, and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a 125 acre homestead. Lane's Landing is near Port Royal, Kentucky, in north central Kentucky, and his parents' birthplaces, and is on the western bank of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio River. Berry has farmed, resided, and written at Lane's Landing down to the present day. He has written about his early experiences on the land and about his decision to return to it in essays such as "The Long-Legged House" and "A Native Hill."

In the 1970s and early 1980s, he edited and wrote for the Rodale Press, including its publications Organic Gardening and Farming and The New Farm. From 1987 to 1993, he returned to the English Department of the University of Kentucky. Berry has written at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and eleven novels and short story collections. His writing is grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place.

Berry, a lifelong Baptist, has criticized Christian organizations for failing to challenge cultural complacency about environmental degradation, and has shown a willingness to criticize what he perceives as the arrogance of some Christians. Berry is a fellow of Britain's Temenos Academy, a learned society devoted to the study of all faiths and spiritual pursuits; Berry publishes frequently in the annual Temenos Academy Review, funded by the Prince of Wales.

Activism
On February 10, 1968 Berry delivered "A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" during the Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft at the University of Kentucky in Lexington:

We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people' by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ‘truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . . I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.

On June 3, 1979 Berry engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant at Marble Hill, Indiana. He describes "this nearly eventless event" and expands upon his reasons for it in the essay "The Reactor and the Garden."

On February 9, 2003 Berry's essay titled "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States" was published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. Berry opened the essay—a critique of the G. W. Bush administration's post-9/11 international strategy —by asserting that "The new National Security Strategy published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation."

On January 4, 2009 Berry and Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute, published an op-ed article in The New York Times titled "A 50-Year Farm Bill." In July, 2009 Berry, Jackson and Fred Kirschenmann, of The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, gathered in Washington DC to promote this idea. Berry and Jackson wrote, "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities."

Also in January 2009 Berry released a statement against the death penalty, which began, “As I am made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life before birth, I am also made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life after birth." And in November 2009, Berry and 38 other writers from Kentucky wrote to Gov. Steve Beshear and Attorney General Jack Conway asking them to impose a moratorium on the death penalty in that state.

On March 2, 2009 Berry joined over 2,000 others in non-violently blocking the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C. No one was arrested.

On May 22, 2009 Berry, at a listening session in Louisville, spoke against the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). He said, "If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you’re going to have to send the police for me. I’m 75 years old. I’ve about completed my responsibilities to my family. I’ll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I’ll have to do it. Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator."

In October 2009 Berry combined with "the Berea-based Kentucky Environmental Foundation (KEF), along with several other non-profit organizations and rural electric co-op members" to petition against and protest the construction of a coal-burning power plant in Clark County, Kentucky. On February 28, 2011, the Kentucky Public Service Commission approved the cancellation of this power plant.

On September 28, 2010 Berry participated in a rally in Louisville during an EPA hearing on how to manage coal ash. Berry said, "The EPA knows that coal ash is poison. We ask it only to believe in its own findings on this issue, and do its duty."

Berry, with 14 other protesters, spent the weekend of February 12, 2011 locked in the Kentucky governor’s office demanding an end to mountaintop removal coal mining. He was part of the environmental group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth that began their sit-in on Friday and left at midday Monday to join about 1,000 others in a mass outdoor rally.

In 2011, The Berry Center was established at New Castle, KY, "for the purpose of bringing focus, knowledge and cohesiveness to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agriculture system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities."

Ideas
Berry's nonfiction serves as an extended conversation about the life he values. According to him, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics, and environmental destruction. As a prominent defender of agrarian values, Berry's appreciation for traditional farming techniques, such as those of the Amish, grew in the 1970s, due in part to exchanges with Draft Horse Journal publisher Maurice Telleen. Berry has long been friendly to and supportive of Wes Jackson, believing that Jackson's agricultural research at The Land Institute lives out the promise of "solving for pattern" and using "nature as model."

Author Rod Dreher writes that Berry's "unshakable devotion to the land, to localism, and to the dignity of traditional life makes him both a great American and, to the disgrace of our age, a prophet without honor in his native land." Similarly, Bill Kauffman argues that “Among the tragedies of contemporary politics is that Wendell Berry, as a man of place, has no place in a national political discussion that is framed by Gannett and Clear Channel." Historian Richard White calls Berry "the environmental writer who has most thoughtfully tried to come to terms with labor" and "one of the few environmental writers who takes work seriously."

The concept of "Solving for pattern", coined by Berry in his essay of the same title, is the process of finding solutions that solve multiple problems, while minimizing the creation of new problems. The essay was originally published in the Rodale Press periodical The New Farm. Though Mr. Berry's use of the phrase was in direct reference to agriculture, it has since come to enjoy broader use throughout the design community.

Berry's core ideas, and in particular his poem "Sabbaths III (Santa Clara Valley)," guided the 2007 feature film, Unforeseen, produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford. The film's director Laura Dunn stated, "We are of course most grateful to Mr. Berry for sharing his inspired work — his poem served as a guide post for me throughout this, at times meandering, project." Berry appears twice in the film narrating his own poem.

Berry has described his feelings on government as follows:

I wish to testify that in my best moments I am not aware of the existence of the government. Though I respect and feel myself dignified by the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution, I do not remember a day when the thought of the government made me happy, and I never think of it without the wish that it might become wiser and truer and smaller than it is.

Poetry
Berry's lyric poetry often appears as a contemporary eclogue, pastoral, or elegy; but he also composes dramatic and historical narratives (such as "Bringer of Water" and "July, 1773", respectively) and occasional and discursive poems ("Against the War in Vietnam" and "Some Further Words", respectively).

Berry's first published poetry book consisted of a single poem, the elegiac November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three (1964), initiated and illustrated by Ben Shahn, commemorating the death of John F. Kennedy. It begins,

We know

The winter earth

Upon the body

Of the young

President,

And the early dark

Falling;

and continues through ten more stanzas (each propelled by the anaphora of "We know"). The elegiac here and elsewhere, according to Triggs, enables Berry to characterize the connections "that link past and future generations through their common working of the land."

The first full-length collection, The Broken Ground (1964), develops many of Berry's fundamental concerns: "the cycle of life and death, responsiveness to place, pastoral subject matter, and recurring images of the Kentucky River and the hill farms of north-central Kentucky"

According to Angyal, "There is little modernist formalism or postmodernist experimentation in [Berry's] verse." A commitment to the reality and primacy of the actual world stands behind these two rejections. In "Notes: Unspecializing Poetry," Berry writes, "Devotion to order that is not poetical prevents the specialization of poetry." He goes on to note, "Nothing exists for its own sake, but for a harmony greater than itself which includes it. A work of art, which accepts this condition, and exists upon its terms, honors the Creation, and so becomes a part of it"

Lionel Basney placed Berry's poetry within a tradition of didactic poetry that stretches back to Horace: "To say that Berry's poetry can be didactic, then, means that it envisions a specific wisdom, and also the traditional sense of art and culture that gives art the task of teaching this wisdom"

For Berry, poetry exists "at the center of a complex reminding" Both the poet and the reader are reminded of the poem's crafted language, of the poem's formal literary antecedents, of  "what is remembered or ought to be remembered," and of "the formal integrity of other works, creatures and structures of the world."

Fiction
Berry's fiction to date consists of eight novels and thirty-eight short stories (twenty-three of which are collected in That Distant Land, 2004) which, when read as a whole, form a chronicle of the fictional small Kentucky town of Port William. Because of his long-term, ongoing exploration of the life of an imagined place, Berry has been compared to William Faulkner. Yet, although Port William is no stranger to murder, suicide, alcoholism, marital discord, and the full range of losses that touch human lives, it lacks the extremes of characterization and plot development that are found in much of Faulkner. Hence Berry is sometimes described as working in an idealized, pastoral, or nostalgic mode, a characterization of his work which he resists: "If your work includes a criticism of history, which mine certainly does, you can't be accused of wanting to go back to something, because you're saying that what we were wasn't good enough."

The effect of profound shifts in the agricultural practices of the United States, and the disappearance of traditional agrarian life, are some of the major concerns of the Port William fiction, though the theme is often only a background or subtext to the stories themselves. The Port William fiction attempts to portray, on a local scale, what "a human economy ... conducted with reverence" looked like in the past—and what civic, domestic, and personal virtues might be evoked by such an economy were it pursued today. Social as well as seasonal changes mark the passage of time. The Port William stories allow Berry to explore the human dimensions of the decline of the family farm and farm community, under the influence of expanding post-World War II agribusiness. But these works rarely fall into simple didacticism, and are never merely tales of decline. Each is grounded in a realistic depiction of character and community. In A Place on Earth (1967), for example, farmer Mat Feltner comes to terms with the loss of his only son, Virgil. In the course of the novel, we see how not only Mat but the entire community wrestles with the acute costs of World War II.

Berry's fiction also allows him to explore the literal and metaphorical implications of marriage as that which binds individuals, families, and communities to each other and to Nature itself—yet not all of Port William is happily or conventionally married. "Old Jack" Beechum struggles with significant incompatibilities with his wife, and with a brief yet fulfilling extramarital affair. The barber Jayber Crow lives with a forlorn, secret, and unrequited love for a woman, believing himself "mentally" married to her even though she knows nothing about it. Burley Coulter never formalizes his bond with Kate Helen Branch, the mother of his son. Yet, each of these men find themselves firmly bound up in the community, the "membership," of Port William.

Berry's novel, Hannah Coulter (2004), presents a concise vision of Port William's "membership." The story encompasses Hannah's life, including the Great Depression, World War II, the postwar industrialization of agriculture, the flight of youth to urban employment, and the consequent remoteness of grandchildren. The tale is told in the voice of an old woman twice widowed, who has experienced much loss yet has never been defeated. Somehow, lying at the center of her strength is the "membership"—the fact that people care for each other and, even in absence, hold each other in a kind of presence. All in all, Hannah Coulter embodies many of the themes of Berry's Port William saga.

Fiction

 * Nathan Coulter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960 (revised North Point, 1985).
 * A Place on Earth. Boston: Harcourt, Brace, 1967 (revised North Point,1983; Counterpoint, 2001).
 * The Memory of Old Jack. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1974. (revised Counterpoint 2001).
 * The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership. San Francisco: North Point, 1986.
 * Remembering. San Francisco: North Point, 1988.
 * Fidelity: Five Stories. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
 * Watch With Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch. New York: Pantheon, 1994.
 * A World Lost. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996.
 * Jayber Crow. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000.
 * Three Short Novels  (Nathan Coulter, Remembering, A World Lost). Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002.
 * Hannah Coulter. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard. 2004.
 * That Distant Land: The Collected Stories. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.
 * Andy Catlett: Early Travels. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006.
 * Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World. Berkeley: Counterpoint. 2009. Available online as "Whitefoot", Orion Magazine. January/February 2007.

Uncollected Stories

 * "Mike". The Sewanee Review. Winter 2005 and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best - 2006. Chapel Hill: Algonquin. 2006.
 * "The Requirement". Harper's Magazine. March 2007.
 * "Burley Coulter's Fortunate Fall". Sewanee Review, Spring 2008, Vol 116 Issue 2, p264-273, 10p.
 * "A Desirable Woman". Hudson Review, Summer 2008, Vol 61 Issue 2, p295-314, 20p.
 * "Stand By Me". The Atlantic. August 2008.
 * "Misery". Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee Review, Winter 2008, Vol 58, Number 3, p111 ff.
 * "A Burden". Oxford American, Issue 66, August 2009, p66-70, 5p.
 * "The Dark Country". Sewanee Review, Spring 2009, Vol 117 Issue 2, pp. 163–180.
 * "Andy Catlett: Early Education". The Threepenny Review. Spring 2009.
 * "Fly Away, Breath". The Threepenny Review. Spring 2008 and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best - 2009. Chapel Hill: Algonquin. 2009.
 * "A Place in Time: Some Chapters of a Telling Story". Hudson Review, Summer 2009, Vol 62 Issue 2, 217–238.
 * "Nothing Living Lives Alone". The Threepenny Review. Spring 2011.
 * "Sold". The Atlantic Fiction 2011, 16–21.
 * "In the Nick of Time". Sewanee Review, Summer 2011, Vol. 119 No. 3, 245-373.

Nonfiction

 * The Long-Legged House. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1969 (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004).
 * The Hidden Wound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
 * The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge. Photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. U P Kentucky, 1971. Revised North Point, 1991. Reissued and revised Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006.
 * A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1972 (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004).
 * The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977; Avon Books, 1978; Sierra Club, 1986.
 * The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. San Francisco: North Point, 1981 (Counterpoint, 2009).
 * Recollected Essays: 1965-1980. San Francisco: North Point, 1981.
 * Standing by Words. San Francisco: North Point, 1983 (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005).
 * Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship, 1984 editor with Wes Jackson and Bruce Colman
 * Home Economics: Fourteen Essays. San Francisco: North Point, 1987 (Counterpoint, 2009).
 * Descendants and Ancestors of Captain James W. Berry, with Laura Berry. Bowling Green, KY: Hub, 1990.
 * Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work. Lexington, Kentucky: U P of Kentucky, 1990.
 * What Are People For? New York: North Point, 1990.
 * ''Standing on Earth, (Selected Essays). Golgonooza Press, (UK), 1991.
 * Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
 * Another Turn of the Crank. Washington, D. C.: Counterpoint, 1996.
 * Grace: Photographs of Rural America with Gregory Spaid and Gene Logsdon. New London, New Hampshire: Safe Harbor Books, 2000.
 * Life Is a Miracle.Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000.
 * In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World. Great Barrington, MA: Orion, 2001.
 * The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Ed. Norman Wirzba. Washington, D. C.: Counterpoint, 2002.
 * Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership in an Age of Terror.(With David James Duncan. Foreword by Laurie Lane-Zucker) Great Barrington, MA: Orion, 2003.
 * Citizenship Papers. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003.
 * Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy. Photographs by James Baker Hall. Lexington, Kentucky: U P of Kentucky, 2004.
 * Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings about Love, Compassion & Forgiveness. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.
 * The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.
 * Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009.
 * Imagination in Place. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010.
 * What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010.
 * The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011. ISBN 978-1-58243-714-9

Uncollected Essays

 * "Against the Death Penalty" "KCADP's You Tube Channel." April 24, 2009.
 * "The Cost of Displacement" The Progressive December 2009/January 2010.

Poetry

 * The Broken Ground. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964.
 * November twenty six nineteen hundred sixty three. New York: Braziller, 1964.
 * Openings. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968.
 * Farming: A Hand Book. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970 (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011).
 * The Country of Marriage. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973.
 * An Eastward Look. Berkeley, California: Sand Dollar, 1974.
 * Sayings and Doings. Lexington, Kentucky: Gnomon, 1975.
 * Clearing. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1977.
 * A Part. San Francisco: North Point, 1980.
 * The Wheel. San Francisco, North Point, 1982.
 * The Collected Poems, 1957-1982. San Francisco: North Point, 1985.
 * Sabbaths: Poems. San Francisco: North Point, 1987.
 * Traveling at Home. Press Alley, 1988; North Point 1989.
 * Entries. New York: Pantheon, 1994 (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997).
 * The Farm. Monterey, Kentucky: Larkspur, 1995.
 * A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998.
 * The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999.
 * The Gift of Gravity, Selected Poems, 1968-2000, Golgonooza Press (UK), 2002.
 * Sabbaths 2002. Monterey, Kentucky: Larkspur, 2004.
 * Given: New Poems. Washington D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard. 2005.
 * Window Poems. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.
 * The Mad Farmer Poems. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.
 * Sabbaths 2006. Monterey, Kentucky: Larkspur, 2008.
 * Leavings. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010.
 * Sabbaths 2009. Sewanee Review, Spring 2011, Volume 119, Number 2, pages 198-205

Interviews

 * Beattie, L. Elisabeth (Editor). "Wendell Berry" in Conversations With Kentucky Writers, U P of Kentucky, 1996.
 * Berger, Rose Marie. "Wendell Berry interview complete text," Sojourner's Magazine, July 2004
 * Fisher-Smith, Jordan. "Field Observations: An Interview with Wendell Berry'"
 * Grubbs, Morris Allen (Editor). Conversations with Wendell Berry, U P of Mississippi, 2007.
 * Minick, Jim. "A Citizen and a Native:An Interview with Wendell Berry" Appalachian Journal, Vol. 31, Nos 3-4, (Spring-Summer, 2004)
 * Weinreb, Mindy. "A Question a Day: A Written Conversation with Wendell Berry" in Merchant
 * Brockman, Holly. "How can a family ‘live at the center of its own attention?’ Wendell Berry’s thoughts on the good life", January/February 2006
 * Smith, Peter. "Wendell Berry's still unsettled in his ways." The Courier-Journal, Sept. 30, 2007, A1.
 * "Wendell Berry: A conversation," The Diane Rehm Show. WAMU 88.5 American University Radio, November 30, 2009.

Forewords, Introductions, Prefaces, and Afterwords

 * Driftwood Valley: A Woman Naturalist in the Northern Wilderness by Theodora C. Stanwell-Fletcher. Oregon State U P, 1999.
 * Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation by Gary Paul Nabhan. U of Arizona P, 2002.
 * God and Work: Aspects of Art and Tradition by Brian Keeble. World Wisdom Books, 2009.
 * Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal by David Kline. The Wooster Book Company, 2001.
 * Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World edited by Martin Keogh. North Atlantic Books, 2010.
 * James Archambeault's Historic Kentucky by James Archambeault. U P of Kentucky, 2006.
 * Kentucky's Natural Heritage: An Illustrated Guide to Biodiversity edited by Greg Abernathy and others. U P of Kentucky, 2010.
 * Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight by Norman Wirzba. Brazos P, 2006.
 * Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness by Erik Reece. Riverhead, 2006.
 * The Man Who Created Paradise by Gene Logsdon. Ohio U P, 2001.
 * The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America's Food Supply by Ken Midkiff. St. Martin's Griffin, 2005.
 * Missing Mountains edited by Kristin Johannsen and others. Wind Publications, 2005.
 * My Mercy Encompasses All: The Koran's Teachings on Compassion, Peace and Love by Reza Shah-Kazemi. Counterpoint, 2007.
 * Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson. Counterpoint, 2011.
 * The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. NYRB Classics, 2009.
 * The Pattern of a Man & Other Stories by James Still. Gnomon P, 2001.
 * Pedestrian Photographs by Larry Merrill. U of Rochester P, 2008.
 * Ralph Eugene Meatyard by Arnold Gassan. Gnomon P, 1970.
 * Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible by Ellen F. Davis. Cambridge U P, 2008.
 * Soil And Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture by Albert Howard. U P of Kentucky, 2007.
 * To a Young Writer by Wallace Stegner. Red Butte P, 2009.
 * The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water by Sim Van der Ryn. Ecological Design Press, 1978.
 * Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith. Island P, 1987.
 * Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape by David T. Hanson. Aperture, 1997.
 * We All Live Downstream: Writings About Mountaintop Removal edited by Jason Howard. MotesBooks, 2009.

Awards

 * Guggenheim Fellowship & Rockefeller Fellowships
 * Jean Stein Award
 * T.S. Eliot Award
 * 2000 Poets' Prize for The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
 * Thomas Merton Award, 1999
 * Aiken Taylor Award for poetry
 * John Hay Award
 * Art of Fact Award, 2006 for non-fiction
 * Kentuckian of the Year 2006 from Kentucky Monthly, for his writing and his efforts to bring attention to environmental issues in eastern Kentucky.
 * Premio Artusi, 2008
 * The Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, 2009
 * The National Humanities Medal, 2010

Works on Berry

 * Merchant, Paul, ed. Wendell Berry (American Authors Series). Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1991.
 * Angyal, Andrew. Wendell Berry. New York: Twayne, 1995.
 * Goodrich, Janet. The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001.
 * Smith, Kimberly K. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace. Lawrence: U P of Kansas, 2003.
 * Peters, Jason, ed. Wendell Berry: Life and Work. Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 2007.
 * Bonzo, J. Matthew and Michael R. Stevens. Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008.
 * Shuman, Joel James and Owens, L. Roger (eds). Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven's Earthly Life. Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 2009.
 * Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love. Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 2011.
 * Mitchell, Mark and Nathan Schlueter. The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011.