1935
Brother John Marshall Jr. born October 13.
1936
Family moves to New Castle, Kentucky, where father practices law and helps with paternal grandfather’s farm, the “Home Place.”
1938
Sister Mary Jo born March 18.
1939
Sister Martha Frances born July 22.
1940
Enters New Castle Elementary School in Henry County. Over the next few years, mother introduces Berry to books about King Arthur’s knights and Robin Hood, as well as The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, and The Yearling. Later will read Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, and Green Grass of Wyoming.
1941
The Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association, representing burley tobacco farmers in Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia with an average farm size of 150 acres, which had been founded in 1921, is revived under the New Deal, establishing parity prices and production control as protections for farmers. Father is one of the principal authors of the program and serves as counsel and vice-president and later president.
1942
Uncle Morgan Perry serves in the navy medical corps during World War II, and because of his knowledge of agriculture, is placed in charge of the garden of the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor.
1944
On July 3, uncle Wendell Holmes Berry, with whom Berry was extremely close, is shot at a defunct lead mine property, where he had been working with a crew salvaging lumber and roofing, after a quarrel with Floyd Martin, one of the owners of the property, and dies the same day.
1948
Finishes the eighth grade at the New Castle School. Enters Millersburg Military Institute in Millersburg, Kentucky, at the same time as his brother, John, Jr. Berry will remember, “It was very confining and military, of course. I never liked the military part of it. I did have some good teachers there, and I began there to read more seriously than I had before. I began to have a favorite subject: literature.” Father speaks before Congress on behalf of the Tobacco Program. In high school, begins tentatively to write poems.
1952
Graduates from Millersburg Military Institute. In the fall, enters University of Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky. Co-edits freshman magazine, Green Pen.
1953
Takes “Introduction to Literature” from Thomas Stroup. Begins bringing Stroup poems for criticism. Later takes classes from Hollis Summers and Robert Hazel. Reads T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In May, publishes first essay, “The Wings of the Future,” in Green Pen, about the survival of society in the light of two world wars and the entrance of the U.S. into the Korean conflict; he writes that it is the “American debt to tomorrow” to ensure that a democratic form of government succeeds over Soviet-style communism. During a composition class, the instructor Robert D. Jacobs introduces Berry to the term “agrarian” and to the 1930s manifesto of the twelve Southern Agrarian writers (who include Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren), I’ll Take My Stand, a work that will be significant (both in influence and in reaction) to the development of Berry’s thought.
1954
Publishes first poem, “Spring,” and first short story, “Summer Crop,” in the spring issue of Stylus, the university literary magazine. Becomes editor of Stylus. At a writers’ conference at Morehead State College in Kentucky meets writer James Still, whose work will become an influence (Berry will later write, “His short stories, I think, are as near to perfect as any writing I know”). In fall, meets James Baker Hall, who will become a close friend, in a creative writing class taught by Hollis Summers, for which Berry writes story “The Brothers” (later part of Nathan Coulter).
1955
Wins Stylus’s Dantzler Award for short story “The Brothers.” In fall, meets Tanya Amyx (born April 30, 1936, in Berkeley, California), a French and music major and daughter of University of Kentucky art professor Clifford Amyx and textile artist Dee Amyx. “The first time I ever saw Tanya,” Berry would later remark, “she was standing by [a] wooden newel post in Miller Hall at the University of Kentucky. Years later, they started to remodel the place. I went over and said, ‘Look. When you tear that post out, I want it.’” (The post is now in the Berrys’ home.) With fellow student Edward M. Coffman, travels to Kenyon College to meet John Crowe Ransom.
1956
Wins Stylus’s Dantzler Award for short story “The Chestnut Stud.” Meets fellow student Gurney Norman. On May 16, submits term paper on I’ll Take My Stand: “The Regional Context: A Consideration of the Southern Agrarians as Southerners.” Graduates from the University of Kentucky with a bachelor’s degree in English. In summer, Berry and James Baker Hall join literature seminars at Indiana University School of Letters; Berry takes course in Joyce and Yeats from Richard Ellman, and course in modern poetry from Karl Shapiro. “The Brothers” wins first prize in the Carolina Quarterly’s 6th Annual Fiction Contest and is published in its summer issue. In the fall, enters the master’s program in English at the University of Kentucky.
1957
In February, poem “Rain Crow” is published in Poetry magazine; in the next five years, his work will be published in Poetry five times. Meets writer Ed McClanahan during a graduate course. Completes MA in English. “Elegy” wins the Farquhar Award for Poetry from the University of Kentucky. Two short stories, “Whippoorwills” and “Apples,” are published in Coraddi: Arts Forum 1957. Marries Tanya Amyx, May 29. In summer, they live in a cabin built by Berry’s great-uncle Curran Mathews, called “the Camp,” on the Kentucky River near Port Royal, which was used as a family retreat from the 1920s. In the fall, they move to an apartment in Georgetown, Kentucky; Berry begins teaching freshman composition and sophomore literature at Georgetown College, father’s alma mater, while Tanya continues to study at the University of Kentucky.
1958
Daughter Mary Dee born May 10 in Lexington. Awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; in August, family moves to Mill Valley, California, to live while he studies creative writing at Stanford University under Stegner (about whom Berry will later write, “My debt to him is probably greater than I know”) and Richard Scowcroft; fellow members of the fiction seminars include Ernest J. Gaines (also a Stegner fellow), Ken Kesey, and Nancy Packer. Lives with family in small house owned by Tanya’s aunt and uncle, Ann and Dick O’Hanlon, which would later become part of the O’Hanlon Center. Works on novel Nathan Coulter: “I had about half of it written when I went out there, and I just continued to work on it.” Introduced by Holman Hamilton, one of Berry’s history professors at the University of Kentucky, to Craig Wylie of Houghton Mifflin, to whom Berry submits the manuscript of Nathan Coulter. Houghton Mifflin purchases an option on the book for $250.
1959
Accepts appointment as Edward H. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University for one year.
1960
In January, begins writing second novel, A Place on Earth. First novel, Nathan Coulter, published in April by Houghton Mifflin. In spring, family moves back to Kentucky, living on the “Home Place” in Henry County, and also farming with Berry’s friend and neighbor Owen Flood.
1961
Receives a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Will later write of Henry County that summer: “I began to understand that so long as I did not know the place fully, or even adequately, I belonged to it only partially. That summer I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here.” In August, leaves with family for a year in Tuscany and southern France to study and write: “the land in Tuscany has had about 2,000 years of good care. And it looked like it when I was there. . . . The sight of that changed my mind about what was possible in land use.”
1962
Meets critic and translator Wallace Fowlie when both stay at La Napoule Arts
Foundation near Cannes. Awarded Vachel Lindsay Prize by Poetry magazine. Returns to Kentucky from Europe in July. Son Pryor Clifford (Den), born August 19 in Lexington. In the fall, moves with family to New York to take up post as assistant professor of English and director of freshman writing at New York University’s University Heights campus in the Bronx. Rents apartment in New Rochelle, New York. Meets Bobbie Ann Mason.
1963
Family moves to loft at 277 Greenwich Street, New York City, downstairs from poet Denise Levertov (whom Berry had met the previous fall, although they had corresponded since 1958, when Levertov wrote Berry about a poem he had published in Poetry) and writer Mitchell Goodman. Tanya arranges playdates for daughter Mary and a fellow student at St. Luke’s School, the daughter of James Parks Morton, later dean of St. John the Divine. Spends summer in Kentucky. Dismantles the Camp, which has flooded several times over the years, and rebuilds it higher on the bank of the river. Works on novel A Place on Earth. Reads Henry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands, an important influence (“It showed me what it might mean to be a responsible Kentucky writer living in Kentucky, and it affected me deeply”). Returns to New York for fall semester. Meets poet Donald Hall, who becomes friend and correspondent, at a cocktail party on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Offered and accepts position as professor of English at the University of Kentucky to begin in the fall of 1964, where he will teach creative writing and other courses.
1964
In May, visits Levertov and Goodman’s Maine farm, where he reads in typescript Hayden Carruth’s poetry collection North Winter (Berry will later begin a correspondence with Carruth that will last until Carruth’s death in 2008). Leaves New York for Kentucky soon after. A poem about Kennedy’s assassination, November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three (with drawings by Ben Shahn) published by George Braziller in May. Begins commuting weekly from Lexington (where family lives) to the Camp to write. Meets Kentucky artist Harlan Hubbard and his wife Anna by chance while on a canoe trip on the Ohio River; later writes that their homestead “differed from Thoreau’s economy radically in some respects, and also advanced and improved upon it. The main differences were that, whereas Thoreau’s was a bachelor’s economy, the Hubbards’ was that of a married couple.” First poetry collection The Broken Ground published by Harcourt, Brace & World in September (a New York Times review will begin: “The quiet but sure and melodious voice of Wendell Berry makes ‘The Broken Ground’ an immediate pleasure”). In November, purchases the Lanes Landing property as a weekend place, a twelve-acre hillside farm adjacent to the Camp and bordering his maternal grandfather’s farm on the west side of the Kentucky River. Berry’s editor at Harcourt, Dan Wickenden, introduces him to the work of organic farming pioneer Sir Albert Howard.
1965
Awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. On July 4, moves with family to Lanes Landing Farm, where they will continue to live and farm year round. “I remember a moment—in 1965, or a little after—when I realized that I didn’t have to be a writer; there were other kinds of work also that required artistry and offered satisfaction. From here, looking back, I can see what a defining moment that was. I had, in effect, decided not to be a ‘professional’ writer, but instead, in the literal sense, an amateur: I would work for love.” Over time, expands the farm until it consists of about 117 acres in two tracts; at first, raises only food for the family. In July, sees first strip mine above Hardburly, Kentucky, while visiting writer Gurney Norman; Norman introduces him to Kentucky lawyer, writer, and environmentalist Harry Caudill and Caudill’s wife Anne, who will become lifelong friends, at a meeting of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People. Will one day write, “Gurney has been my Virgil on the upper end (the mountain end) of the Kentucky River watershed, where he is at home. I’m at home on the lower end.”
1967
In summer, makes first notes for a work that will become The Unsettling of America after reading about the report of President Johnson’s “special commission on federal food and fiber policies” that defined the nation’s greatest agriculture problem as a surplus of farmers. Novel A Place on Earth published by Harcourt, Brace & World in September. Receives Bess Hoken Prize from Poetry magazine. Becomes president of the Cumberland Chapter of the Sierra Club in Kentucky. Begins work with farmers and landowners to oppose a dam across the Red River Gorge that would destroy the gorge’s unique topography and ecosystem. In December, visits Trappist monk Thomas Merton at Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, with Ralph Eugene Meatyard and his wife Madelyn, Tanya, and Denise Levertov.
1968
On February 10, delivers speech, “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” during the Kentucky Conference on War and the Draft in Lexington, Kentucky: “I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.” In fall, takes leave from University of Kentucky to become visiting professor of creative writing at Stanford University during fall 1968 and winter 1969 quarters; lives with family in Menlo Park. Colleagues at Stanford include Wallace Stegner, Ed McClanahan, and Ken Fields. Meets writer John Haines when he gives a reading at Stanford. During the Christmas holiday, writes The Hidden Wound, an extended meditation on race and memories of two older black people who were his friends during his childhood. Poetry collection Openings published by Harcourt, Brace & World in October; The New York Times reviewer calls it a book “to win the respect of anyone who cares about contemporary verse.”
1969
Returns with family to Kentucky. Essay collection The Long-Legged House, of which the title essay is about the history of the Camp, published by Harcourt, Brace & World in April; other essays concern place and belonging, agriculture, community, small farming, the Vietnam War, and consumerism. The same month, poetry collection Findings published by The Prairie Press. Wins first prize in the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards. Receives grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
1970
On March 7, speaks at the march at the state capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky, to protest the war in Vietnam; his speech notes government disdain for the will of the people and the huge expense of the war: “With the very earth dying under our feet, with the air full of pollution; we are spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives to assure the success of tyranny in Vietnam.” At the first Earth Day celebration at the University of Kentucky, delivers speech “Think Little.” Publishes essay “The Regional Motive” in the autumn issue of The Southern Review, a response to the Southern Agrarians; in it, he is critical of those Agrarians who had moved to northern universities, saying that it “invalidated their thinking, and reduced their effort to the level of an academic exercise.” (Receives letter from Allen Tate in response, and when the essay is included in A Continuous Harmony in 1972, Berry appends an apologetic footnote; he later writes that “whatever the amount of truth in that statement, and there is some, it is also a piece of smartassery.”) Poetry collection Farming: A Hand Book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in September. Meets writer and farmer Gene Logsdon, who becomes a friend and ally, after Logsdon reads Farming: A Hand Book. The Hidden Wound published by Houghton Mifflin in September.
1971
The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge published by University Press of Kentucky in April, with photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard; it is a response to the plan to dam the Red River, which Berry had opposed since 1967. (Congress will withdraw funds for the project in 1976. In 1993 the river is designated by Congress in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System Act.) Elected Distinguished Professor of the Year by the University of Kentucky. Receives the Arts and Letters Literary Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1972
With his brother John Berry Jr. and the Save Our Land Committee, helps in the successful opposition to the Jefferson County Air Board’s plan for an international jetport in Henry and Shelby Counties. In the fall
, takes a one-year sabbatical from the University of Kentucky; his courses are covered by Ed McClanahan. Essay collection A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in September. Meets bookseller and future publisher Jack Shoemaker when Shoemaker visits Port Royal after reading The Long-Legged House.
1973
The Country of Marriage published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in February, his fifth poetry collection, with thirty-five poems, including the title poem, “Prayer After Eating,” and “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Buys neighboring forty-acre farm that had been sold to a developer, bulldozed, and graveled; begins process of repair and restoration. Invites writer and photographer James Baker Hall to take photographs during a tobacco harvest (they will be published with an essay by Berry in 2004). Begins correspondence with poet and essayist Gary Snyder, and after a few months Snyder travels to Port Royal to visit Lanes Landing. In November, brother elected to the Kentucky senate, in which he will serve until 1981.
1974
Serves as Elliston Poetry Lecturer at the University of Cincinnati for winter 1974. Novel The Memory of Old Jack published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in February (The New York Times Book Review calls it “a slab of rich Americana” and Library Journal says the novel is “worthy of a place among the best pieces of prose written by American writers of this century”). Meets Maurice Telleen at a draft horse sale in Waverly, Iowa, whose Draft Horse Journal will publish many of Berry’s stories. Gives speech on July 1 at “Agriculture for a Small Planet Symposium” in Spokane, Washington, which will form the basis for the first chapters of The Unsettling of America: “I was asked to talk about ‘Labor Intensive Micro-Systems Agriculture.’ That’s not my language, and it’s not the sort of language I wish to use because it’s the way people speak when they don’t want to be understood by most people. I’m not sure what to make of these particular phrases, but they seem to suggest a very methodological or technological approach to agriculture. Part of my purpose here is to suggest that any such approach will necessarily be too simple.” Mentions critically Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s “adapt or die” policy. Speech helps encourage the Tilth movement, a regional network of organic farmers in the Northwest (still active today). Poetry collection An Eastward Look published by Sand Dollar Press in the fall, Berry’s first publication with editor Jack Shoemaker. Wins the Emily Clark Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 110