Beloved writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry has died at age 92

President Barack Obama presents the 2010 National Humanities Medal to Wendell E. Berry during a White House ceremony in 2011. Mark Wilson/Getty Images hide caption

President Barack Obama presents the 2010 National Humanities Medal to Wendell E. Berry during a White House ceremony in 2011.

Novelist and poet Wendell Berry spent his life farming his land for food and for prose. It was land his family farmed and lived on for seven generations before him, in Henry County Kentucky.

Berry started his career as a writer as an academic. He studied at the University of Kentucky, then Stanford, and had taken a prestigious position as an English professor at New York University by the time he was 28. But city life was never for him.

In the 1968 essay A Native Hill , Berry wrote about his decision to leave behind the New York literary world just two years into his career, in favor of his home county in Kentucky. "I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life."

It was a hope he accomplished. The land Berry farmed in Henry County became the primary inspiration for his work as a writer and as an environmentalist. He was a stark critic of industrialized farming, and generally skeptical of technology. He never owned a computer–preferring instead to hand write his work, and then type it up on a typewriter he purchased new in 1956 and never needed to replace.

Berry's writing was an endeavor in slowing down, and noticing his surroundings – whether these were trees, people, or the imprint of a breeze on a hill – as in the 2001 poem "June Wind."

Other poems used similarly sharp prose to comment on the broader political sphere. "Against the War in Vietnam" was published in 1968.