Wendell Berry and a Good Death

The Dangers of an Ideal: Wrestling With Wendell Berry’s Legacy

Rural minister Allen Stanton reflects on the legacy of late writer, farmer, and environmentalist Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry's Death Should Be His Revival - Kentucky Center for Economic Policy

Throughout his life, Kentucky writer Wendell Berry described death not as an end, but as a stage in a cycle of renewal. Those who die return in body to the earth and endure in the memory of those who loved them. In “Three Elegaic Poems,” dedicated to his dying grandfather, Berry says the old man […]

Wendell Berry and a Good Death

When I heard of Wendell Berry’s passing, I was of course saddened. But a part of me was glad, too: for Berry has finally and fully done what he wrote of and practiced many times throughout his life. He has worked well and, having finished his work, has gone home to rest. He has descended into a darkness that has already and still will give way to fuller light. Berry was the first writer I encountered who made me seriously consider death: what c…

TRIBUTE: Wendell Berry was a radical for love

One thing I’ve learned in the last days of mourning is that there’s no kind of person who reads Wendell Berry. In literature, you have your William Faulkner highbrows and Jack Kerouac bros and Sylvia Plath weepers, but there’s no Berry archetype. When the legendary Kentuckian poet, essayist and storyteller died on Monday, Aug. 31, the entire world of letters hurt. I wrote a brief bio of Berry for a book review back in April, but I’ll repeat it h…