I first met Wendell Berry in November 2019 at his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he lived for most of his life with his wife, Tanya. I was then the editor of The Progressive, headed with a colleague to the University of Louisville to put on a workshop on op-ed writing. The Berrys’ farm was more or less on the way, so we arranged to stop by.
It was a cordial visit (Tanya was away, so we didn’t get to meet her) that included a tour of the surrounding area in Wendell’s pick-up truck. He told stories and gifted us with copies of his books. At the time, I had only read his best-known nonfiction book, 1977’s The Unsettling of America, and a few of his poems. I had seen Look and See, the 2016 documentary film that was made about him, oddly without his participation. And I knew that he had contributed about twenty pieces to The Progressive over the years.
But Wendell himself, who died “suddenly and peacefully” on August 31, less than a month after his ninety-second birthday, was a revelation. I am not sure I have ever met anyone who was so completely at ease in his own skin. His attention was complete, his mind always on the lookout for a witty rejoinder, his sense of enjoyment palpable. When he laughed, which he did at every opportunity, his whole lanky body would quietly quiver.
Toward the end of this first visit, Berry gave me a short piece of writing he had been toying with, asking me to “refute” it if I could. This is what it said:
The American public is living off the drawdown of the natural fertility or reproductivity of the economic landscapes of agriculture and forestry—a principal upon which the consumers pay less than interest. They pay not a cent for the maintenance of their fundamental and paramount resources: the productive land and the human establishment upon it. The living earth is understood simply as a basis or floor upon which to convert expensive “inputs” into cheap food.
Back home again in Madison, Wisconsin, I wrote a lengthy and I hope thoughtful reply, which prompted a further reflection from Wendell. This in turn launched what would be a nearly seven-year correspondence during which we sent each other many dozens of letters, dealing with all manner of topics: books, politics, culture, things that were happening in our lives. My letters were composed on a computer (a technology Wendell firmly eschewed, along with smart phones and dumb television). His letters to me, virtually all signed, “Your Friend, Wendell,” were sometimes typed but more often written by hand, on yellow legal pad paper.
Over the years, as we sent letters back and forth, I read more than forty of Wendell’s books (just a handful short of his total), running the gamut from novels and short stories to collections of poems and essays, to major works like The Need to Be Whole, which came out in 2022. Over the subsequent years, my wife Linda and I visited the Berrys three times, in 2021, 2023, and 2025, always in autumn and always with a canine companion who was allowed to break the Berrys’ usual rule of no dogs in the house. On each occasion, I brought along my copy of the novel I consider to be his greatest masterpiece, Hannah Coulter, finally remembering to ask him to sign it on our third visit.
There were times in our correspondence when Wendell and I clashed, sometimes spectacularly. Wendell was no shrinking violet, and, truth be told, I can also be a bit abrasive. “I think that this correspondence should stop,” he wrote at one point, early on. But we continued to find reasons to keep the letters flowing. When I suggested that our correspondence might make for an interesting book, he wanted nothing to do with it, saying I could do so when he was dead. I told him I wished he could muster a bit more enthusiasm for this prospect.
Wendell didn’t want anything—especially things related to self-promotion—to get in the way of his work, which he continued to do, capably, until the very end. He indicated to me that he had not even read a rather excellent book that had been written about him by one of his greatest admirers. I’m frankly a bit surprised that he took time off in 2011 to travel to the White House, where President Barack Obama presented him with a National Humanities Medal “for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer, and conservationist.”
No one has taken a more dour view of the state of the world than Wendell Berry. He saw as clearly as anyone how the nation’s progression from agrarianism to corporatism is ruining the planet, destroying communities, and leaving us all on some level impoverished. And yet he always managed to be determinedly optimistic. As he put it in “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” one of his best-known poems, “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” This feels like urgently needed advice for the present moment.
During our first meeting, Wendell told me that his great asset as a writer, according to Tanya, was his knack for repeating himself. And it’s true: His novels, essays, and poetry all embrace the same themes. They celebrate rural America for what it was and what it could be, and they lament the disconnect between much of the public and the battered land that sustains it. Since 2011, this cause has been taken up by the Berry Center, a nonprofit based in New Castle, Kentucky, and headed by Wendell and Tanya’s daughter, Mary Berry. Its mission is “putting Wendell Berry’s writings to work by advocating for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies.”
Wendell was, of course, appalled by Donald Trump. In one of his letters to me, sent shortly after the November 2024 election, he had this to say, in response to my last letter to him: “[Trump] seems to me to be limitless, there is no telling what he may do, and I’m a man who believes in limits. He is a surprise to me. I didn’t know that such a man existed, or could exist. I suppose that is because such men normally disguise their infamy, but he boasts of his. And here I complete my agreement with you: I didn’t know so many humans could admire such a man.”
In his final letter to me, dated July 30, Wendell offered these words of advice: “No doubt we must oppose Trump, but we must [not] do so by being in favor of what is not-Trump. We must not shrink ourselves to the littleness of Trump in order to oppose him.”
America has never had a wiser nor more incisive commentator than Wendell Berry. He has changed the lives and thinking of great numbers of people, from journalist Michael Pollan, to environmentalist Bill McKibben, to novelist Barbara Kingsolver, to actor Nick Offerman. Wendell set an example of steadfastness and moral clarity to which we can all aspire. And he was, in my experience, a true friend. It’s fitting that my sadness over his passing is assuaged by his own work. Here is his poem, published just last November in The New Yorker, which the Berry Center sent out to supporters on the day after his death:
