Wendell Berry

An impassioned, thoughtful, and fearless essay on the effects of racism on the American identity by one of our country’s most humane literary voices.
Acclaimed as “one of the most humane, honest, liberating works of our time” (The Village Voice), The Hidden Wound is a book-length essay about racism and the damage it has done to the identity of our country. Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains...

"A Kentucky farmer and writer, and perhaps the great moral essayist of our day, Berry has produced one of his shortest but also most powerful volumes." —The New York Review of Books
From modern health care to the practice of forestry, from local focus to national resolve, Wendell Berry argues, there can never be a separation between global ecosystems and human communities—the two are intricately connected, and the health...

First published in 1972, “Think Little” is cultural critic and agrarian Wendell Berry at his best: prescient about the dire environmental consequences of our mentality of greed and exploitation, yet hopeful that we will recognize war and oppression and pollution not as separate issues, but aspects of the same. “Think Little” is presented here alongside one of Berry’s most popular and personal essays, “A Native Hill.”...

An urgent, visionary, and heartfelt collection of essays focused on recovering deeper, time–honored values against the ravages of modern society.
. In six elegant, linked literary essays, Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever–widening cleft between the words and their referents mirrors the increasing...

During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open–ended sequence he's found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings—these are...

Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others. Without historical understanding of this practice of dispossession—the displacement of Native peoples, the destruction...

Join us for an hour of stirring and straightforward wisdom from one of the most highly respected of modern American writers and poets. Using words like "affection" and "satisfaction," "care" and "joy," Berry calls for a re-evaluation of the basic values and practices of our lives. He illustrates his ideas with glimpses of his own life and those of his Kentucky farm neighbors, and describes a future where we can learn to find love, wisdom and meaning...

A soulful, searching collection of essays that tackle the complexities of contemporary America from “the prophet of rural America” (New York Times).
From the war in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina to the political sniping engendered by Supreme Court nominations—contemporary American society is characterized by divisive anger, profound loss, and danger. Wendell Berry, “the prophet of rural America” (New...

Long before organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Wendell Berry was farming and writing with the purity of food in mind. For the last five decades, he has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of Berry's influence, Michael Pollan offers an introduction to this new collection. "To read the essays in this sparkling anthology," he writes, "many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s,...

This novel tells the story of one year in the life of young Nathan Coulter, who is growing up on a farm in the fictional community of Port William, Kentucky.