SOURCE: “Into the Woods with Wendell Berry,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 124-40.

In the following essay, Knot examines the role of wilderness in Berry's work.

Wendell Berry commands attention as a passionate and eloquent defender of sustainable agriculture on a human scale, a morally as well as economically viable farming that implies respect for the land, for family and community, and for the wisdom embodied in local culture. Through his fiction, his poetry (including Farming: A Handbook), and especially collections of essays such as The Unsettling of America and The Gift of Good Land, Berry has become widely known as a persuasive defender of life and work rooted in a particular, rural place (in his case a hill farm in Henry County, Kentucky) and as a trenchant critic of agribusiness and of what he would call the industrial as opposed to the natural economy...