Wendell Berry, celebrated author and fierce defender of agrarian life, dies at 92

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Set us as preferred Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and writer whose work advocated fiercely for working landscapes and working people, died “suddenly and peacefully” on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky., according to his family.He was 92.His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed his death.

On Thursday, she told The Times that her father, until about six months ago, was still writing regularly in his cabin on the banks of the Kentucky River, a place he called “camp,” where many of his more than 50 volumes of poetry, short stories, essays and novels were written.Berry championed sustainable farming and rural community preservation and railed against industrial agriculture and corporate agribusiness.“He was fierce and he was fearless, and he remained fearless,” she said, explaining that her family taught her the erosion of rural places wasn’t inevitable but “destruction by design,” engineered by corporate interests and political policies.Berry, whose writings were often fueled by an anger toward the forces that have driven the destruction of the rural land and communities that he dedicated his life to defending, softened in his final years, according to his daughter.

“He was always a tender man, and that part of him got stronger.He was rereading a lot of books that he had loved in his life, and he told me he was looking for the tenderness in the books, and that’s a lovely thing.”Berry’s most influential work began with a list of the problems he’d observed in modern agriculture, scribbled onto a legal pad as he traveled the long stretch of road between Kentucky’s Henry County and Spokane, Wash., where Berry would deliver a speech at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium in 1974.“I was asked to talk about labor-intensive microsystems agriculture.

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