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NEW YORK — <\/span>Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian who in poems, stories, novels and essays celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned of the excesses and misjudgments of an industrial, commercialized society, has died. He was 92.<\/p>\n His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed on Monday that he died in his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s not enough I could say about him to do him justice,\u201d she told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n Few authors were more tied to their home than Berry, an intellectual and spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau and such Southern agrarians as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. In prose and poetry that mirrored the uncluttered and deeply felt life he advocated, Berry challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness and renewed the mysteries of birth, love, work and death. He had learned from his own history: Berry was born and raised in a farming town during the Great Depression and watched its seemingly immortal ties unravel by his teens.<\/p>\n \u201cIncreasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world,\u201d he wrote in \u201cAndy Catlett: Early Travels,\u201d a novel published in 2006, \u201cand that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n Berry was a prolific writer who published more than 40 books, including the novels \u201cNathan Coulter\u201d and \u201cA Place on Earth,\u201d and the anthology \u201cA Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.\u201d His legacy extended well beyond Kentucky. Michael Pollan, author of such bestsellers as \u201cThe Omnivore\u2019s Dilemma,\u201d would say his life was changed by Berry\u2019s declaration that \u201cEating is an agricultural act.\u201d The chef and food activist Alice Waters cited him as a favorite author and wrote an introduction to Berry\u2019s 1989 essay \u201cThe Pleasures of Eating.\u201d<\/p>\n He was among the most prominent authors never to receive a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award, although his honors included a National Humanities Medal and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, he was presented a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.<\/p>\n The tall, slender Berry imagined, chronicled and lived out his vision of a self-sustaining community in which no one had to ask where their food came from or the names of their neighbors. In the classic farming manifesto \u201cThe Unsettling of America,\u201d published in 1977, he attacked the consolidation and mechanization of agriculture as a violation of the natural order, whether of the land or of the spirit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe modern urban\u2010industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAt each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and experts sets up a profit\u2010making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation.\u201d<\/p>\n His disdain for modernity touched upon virtually every aspect of life, from dancing to weather forecasts to birth control, opinions he well knew were not universally shared. Reviewing a Library of America anthology of his nonfiction, The New York Times\u2019 Dwight Garner wrote that Berry \u201cbangs the same themes so relentlessly \u2014 the perils of industrial agriculture, the decimation of rural life, America\u2019s blind faith in technology \u2014 that one\u2019s eyes begin to cross.\u201d<\/p>\n Most of his fiction, closely based on his childhood, was set in rural Port William and populated with such characters as drunken Uncle Peach, the drowned Chicken Little, the wise and patient farm hand Dick Watson and Andy Catlett, Berry\u2019s alter ego, a boy \u201cinclined to be dreamy\u201d and \u201cslide right out of the present world.\u201d<\/p>\n His worldview was shaped by an ancient sense of continuity and connection, like in the story \u201cWatch with Me,\u201d when a troubled man known as \u201cNightlife\u201d picks up an old shotgun and disappears into the woods. A local posse follows, led by the farmer Tol Proudfoot, who worries Nightlife might kill himself or harm others. The pursuit is long and exhausting. \u201cI reckon it would be better not to have got involved,\u201d Tol admits to himself. But he knows that he will continue \u201cuntil whatever happened that would allow him (Tol) to cease to go along had happened.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI reckon I am involved,\u201d Tol discovers.<\/p>\n Berry yearned for the past but was \u201cpainfully divided\u201d by his awareness that \u201cmy people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors\u201d and that \u201cpeople were once bought and sold here by my people.\u201d He saw the U.S. as plagued by \u201cdisorderly violence,\u201d and inflamed by the rootlessness of the early settlers and the corporations that followed. <\/p>\n \u201cWe still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America,\u201d he lamented.<\/p>\n