Essays From West of 98: An Ode to Wendell

Thoughts on Wendell Berry's life on the occasion of his 89th birthday

Wendell Berry turned 89 on August 5. To folks of a certain type (read: like me), it was cause to celebrate. When I say, “celebrate,” I certainly don’t mean that in any stereotypical sense. Rather, it causes people like me to contemplate the meaning of another person’s life on your own life and the world around you, even when you’ve never met.

My fellow Berry enthusiast Lenny Wells, a pecan farmer and researcher in Georgia, described Berry as one of America’s greatest living writers. I wholeheartedly agree. Other authors have sold more copies of books and have wider fame. Unlike Berry, those authors probably have cellular telephones, computers, social media accounts, and an interest in publicity. He has none of those. He has simply cranked out dozens of works—novels, essays, poems, open letters, and more—for over 60 years, outlining a variety of concerns with American society, religion, agriculture, and more, and proposing solutions for the ills we are facing.

In many ways, Wendell Berry is a prophet. Many of his writings from the 1960s and 1970s, like his seminal work “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture,” warned of which we are now experiencing in life today. His essay “The Work of Local Culture” describes the perils of losing local culture in favor of television-centered national culture. Not only was he correct, but those perils were exponentially increased by the Internet and social media that followed television into our lives.

But there is a particular aspect of Wendell Berry’s life which warrants mentioning here. In 1964, Berry was living in New York, working as a writer and teaching English at New York University. He announced his intentions to move back to his family’s Kentucky farm, so that he could write about rural America while actually living in rural America and personally facing the positives and negatives of rural life. He was mocked roundly. Some in the New York literary and academic circles effectively told him that he had potential as a writer, but if he moved from the center of the literary universe to a Kentucky farm, not only would he waste his potential stardom, but he would never be heard from again.

Wendell Berry did not listen. He moved back to Kentucky. He wrote and farmed while teaching part-time at the University of Kentucky until 1977, when he devoted all his energy to writing and farming. 45 years later, he is more famous and influential than all the folks who told him he was wasting his potential.

For over 60 years now, Wendell Berry has written about rural America—why it matters, why it struggles, how it can prosper again. He also proven with his own life that a person of extraordinary talent need not worry about “wasting” themselves by moving to rural America. Truly talented and capable people will thrive and make a difference in the world, regardless of what sounds trendy at the time.

Wendell Berry believes in rural America. He has proved it with his words, his action, and his life over 89 years and a 60-plus year career as a writer. That is an inspiration and a template to many people around the country, me being just one of many in that number.

I believe in rural America too. So should you.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.