Wendell Berry, the novelist, poet, essayist and farmer, died on August 31, 2026, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. Berry spent much of his long career defending precisely the things modern life teaches us to leave behind: place, inherited obligations and the local community. Having left Kentucky for an academic career that took him to Stanford and New York, he returned to his home county in the 1960s and spent the rest of his life farming and writing there.
I became acquainted with Berry’s work this year through his book Hannah Coulter. His passing felt like an appropriate occasion to reflect on a theme that book highlighted to me: what exactly do we mean when we talk about freedom and choice? Berry understood that escaping one set of limits does not make us limitless. Very often it merely exchanges limits we have inherited for limits we have chosen – and the latter are not necessarily better.
