ILLUSTRATION BY JOE CIARDIELLOA
t a time when political conflict
runs deep and erects high walls,
the Kentucky essayist, novelist,
and poet Wendell Berry main-
tains an arresting mix of admirers.
Barack Obama awarded him the Nation-
al Humanities Medal in 2011. The fol-
lowing year, the socialist-feminist writer
and editor Sarah Leonard published a
friendly interview with him in Dissent.
Yet he also gets respectful attention in
the pages of The American Conservative
and First Things, a right-leaning, tradi-
tionalist Christian journal.
More recently, The New Yorker ran an
introduction to Berry’s thought distilled
from a series of conversations, stretching
over several years, with the critic Amanda
Petrusich. In these conversations, Ber-
ry patiently explains why he doesn’t call
himself a socialist or a conservative and
recounts the mostly unchanged creed un-
derlying his nearly six decades of writ-
ing and activism. Over the years, he has
called himself an agrarian, a pacifist, and aChristian—albeit of an eccentric kind. He
has written against all forms of violence
and destruction—of land, communities,
and human beings—and argued that the
modern American way of life is a skein of
violence. He is an anti-capitalist moralist
and a writer of praise for what he admires:
the quiet, mostly uncelebrated labor and
affection that keep the world whole and
might still redeem it. He is also an acer-
bic critic of what he dislikes, particularly
modern individualism, and his emphasis
on family and marriage and his ambiv-
alence toward abortion mark him as an
outsider to the left.Books & the Arts
Jedediah Britton-Purdy teaches at Columbia
University and is the author of the new book
This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for
a New Commonwealth.
A SHARED PLACE
Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent
by JEDEDIAH BRITTON-PURDY