Berry has found a kind of salvation—and a lifelong subject—in his stewardship of the land he farms in Kentucky. Illustration by John Broadley
When we previously mentioned him it was without as much background as he deserved. So now, a corrective titled Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age, by Dorothy Wickenden. It comes with a set of photographs that motivate you to read on:
Sixty years after renouncing modernity, the writer is still contemplating a better way forward.
Hidden in the woods on a slope above the Kentucky River, just south of the Ohio border, is a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin with a long front porch. If not for the concrete pilings that raise the building high off the ground, it would seem almost a living part of the forest. Readers around the world know the “long-legged house” as the place where Wendell Berry, as a twenty-nine-year-old married man with two young children, found his voice. As he explained in his essay by that name, he built the cabin in the summer of 1963—a place where he could write, read, and contemplate the legacies of his forebears, and what inheritance he might leave behind.
When Berry moved to the country with his wife, Tanya, he gave her a privy that “never aspired so high as to have a door.” Photograph by James Baker Hall
The cabin began as a log house built by Berry’s great-great-great-grandfather Ben Perry, one of the area’s first settlers, and it lived on as a multigenerational salvage operation. Continue reading
