American essayist, poet, novelist, and farmer who for sixty years has worked the same hillside farm in Henry County, Kentucky, and has produced from it one of the most sustained bodies of dissenting American writing of his lifetime. Berry is a lay Baptist of independent temper, an agrarian in the tradition of the Southern Agrarians but without their racial politics, and an early and consistent critic of industrial agriculture, global capital, strip mining, the military-industrial order, and what he calls the "total economy" that reduces human lives and the living world to commodity inputs.
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) is his central book-length argument — that the industrialization of farming has been a cultural and ecological disaster, severing the links among land, work, food, place, and community on which human dignity actually depends. The argument is continued across dozens of essay collections: What Are People For? (1990), Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (1993), Citizenship Papers (2003), The Art of the Commonplace (2002). His stance is explicitly Christian — a Sermon-on-the-Mount Christianity of neighborliness, humility, and the rejection of violence — and explicitly political, though it refuses the terms of both major parties. He has been among the most eloquent American critics of the idea that "the economy" names something that could be opposed to human flourishing and still be worth having.
Alongside the essays runs the Port William fiction — Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, and the stories — a half-century-spanning imaginative history of one small Kentucky community and the losses industrial modernity inflicts on it. And the poetry: The Country of Marriage, the Sabbath poems written on Sunday walks, a devotional body of work of great plainness and intensity.