Try our Advanced SearchShort stories by Wendell Berry
WENDELL BERRY was born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1934. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Kentucky in 1956 and continued on to complete a master’s degree in 1957. In 1958, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.Berry has taught at Stanford University, Georgetown College, New York University, the University of Cincinnati, and Bucknell University. He taught at his alma mater, the University of Kentucky from 1964-77, and again from 1987-93. The author of more than 40 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Wendell Berry has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1962), the Vachel Lindsay Prize from Poetry (1962), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1965), a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing (1971), the Emily Clark Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review (1974), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award (1987), a Lannan Foundation Award for Non-Fiction (1989), Membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers (1991), the Ingersoll Foundation's T. S. Eliot Award (1994), the John Hay Award (1997), the Lyndhurst Prize (1997), and the Aitken-Taylor Award for Poetry from The Sewanee Review (1998). His books include the novel Hannah Coulter (2004), the essay collections Citizenship Papers (2005) and The Way of Ignorance (2006), and Given: Poems (2005), all available from Counterpoint. Berry's latest works include The Mad Farmer Poems (2008) and Whitefoot (2009), which features illustrations by Davis Te Selle. He lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky.
Listing 5 stories.
A young boy finds a clearing while exploring the wilderness and meditatively observes the nature around him.
An old man reflects on his youth in the countryside in twentieth-century Kentucky, and thinks of the freedom now lost to industrialization and displacement.
In a poignant reflection on the legacies of the past, a man finally hears from his grandmother the full account of his great-grandfather’s death at the hands of a close friend.
In 1920s Kentucky, the death of his wife leaves a farmer sorrowful and overwhelmed by his two young boys, leaving it up to his brother and parents to step in.
A young boy at a fishing pond finds himself in a predicament when, as he witnesses two adults having sex, the tree branch he's sitting on gives way. The boy's telling of the story becomes a legend for his small town in Kentucky.