Forsaking Success: Wendell Berry’s Return to Kentucky

I find the biblical story of the Rich Young Ruler’s encounter with Jesus particularly vexing. A man approaches Jesus, eager to follow him. Jesus acknowledges that the man is righteous and then tells him to give all his money to the poor. This command requires a sacrifice not only of money but also of status and comfort—a willingness to live in obscurity. But the cost is too steep, he cannot pay it. He is filled with an intense sorrow. Though most of us will not stand before Christ to renounce wealth and status—at least in this life—we will all face painful choices about what a life of conviction requires.

A Radical Move

A young Wendell Berry made a consequential choice to live out his conviction in the spring of 1964. An assistant professor of English at New York University, he had to return home to Kentucky. The day he formally announced his resignation, Berry’s supervisor called him into his office. The senior faculty member must have assumed that the young Berry—not yet thirty—simply did not grasp what he was throwing away. It was one last appeal from the world he was leaving behind, to not throw away the extraordinary success before him for the obscurity—and fidelity—of Kentucky. His choice, according to Berry, amounted to “intellectual death; cut off from the cultural springs of the metropolis” in the eyes of the literary world. His supervisor invoked Thomas Wolfe’s famous line, warning Berry that “you can’t go home again.” The meeting did not move Berry; his face was set like flint toward Kentucky.

Years later, Berry’s advisor, Wallace Stegner, a literary giant in his own right, reflected on Berry’s choice to return to Kentucky in a letter. “That was a move as radical as Thoreau’s retreat to Walden, and much more permanent. I am sure that people told you were burying yourself, that you couldn’t come into the literary world with manure on your barn boots and expect to be welcomed, that you owed it to yourself and your gift to stay out where the action was.” It was clear to Berry and those in his circle that moving to Kentucky was tantamount to forfeiting the promise of literary success. What is more, Berry made a more radical decision than moving to Kentucky while living in New York City. Berry’s daughter, Mary, recalls a meeting her father had with Scribner’s Publishing in New York City between 1962 and 1964. One of the editors apparently told the young Kentuckian, “We’re going to make you famous.” Berry did not bite. Like his move back to Kentucky, Berry confounded his peers and mentor by turning down a literary tide of fortune.

Berry’s Early Success

Berry’s early success reads like the stuff of dreams. After excelling as an undergraduate and master’s student at the University of Kentucky and teaching at a small Kentucky college for a year, he received Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He then did something unheard of: publish his first novel with a major commercial press at twenty-five while still at Stanford. Critical reviews of Nathan Coulter lauded his ability. Newspaper critics across the nation said the young writer was only scratching the surface of his potential—better novels were sure to follow. The arc of his rising fortune bent higher still in 1961 when Berry received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The prestigious honor took him to Italy to write his second novel. After his Fellowship, he landed a prized position at New York University as the director of freshman English. This was not lost on his wife, Tanya—herself the daughter of a professor—who understood precisely the kind of opportunity her husband held.

Life in New York, by all appearances, was promising. Immersed in lower Manhattan’s vibrant literary scene, Berry felt exhilarated. After living in New Rochelle for a short stint, the Berrys moved to a loft apartment just blocks from Washington Square and the city’s last wholesale food markets—loud, crowded, and gritty, and only a short walk from the Federal-style calm of City Hall with its white marble façade. But New York City was not where he was supposed to be—he had to return home. Later in life, Berry recalled that his literary friends were upset by his departure from New York City, believing he was ruining his future. The decision cost Berry dearly since, as he writes, “I had reached the greatest city in the nation; I had a good job; I was meeting other writers.”

Berry’s home state took notice of his early achievements and celebrated him. Back home, readers waited in line to borrow Nathan Coulter from the Kentucky state library. His Guggenheim Fellowship, his travel to Italy, and his first novel were fodder for local newspapers. In the early 1960s, Kentucky papers frequently ran articles with titles such as “Henry County Man Wins Study Grant” and “New Castle Author Wins $5,000 Award.” He appeared on lists of “Impressive” Kentuckians and received an extensive write-up titled “Novelist To Seek Quiet of Italy.” At 29, a biography of him appeared in Ish Richey’s Kentucky Literature: 1784-1963, detailing the most accomplished authors in the state. Kentuckians saw his success in faraway cities and national notoriety as the definition of success. Berry later shared, “[I was] taught by schools that I would never amount to anything if I stayed at home.” When he got to New York City, he thought, “Well, this is what one does.” It was the expectation that any young Kentucky man with opportunity would move to a city and take the highest-paying job offered. During the out-migration of the 1950s, nearly one in three Kentuckians in their twenties left the state to find work in a city. His decision to forsake that path and move back to Henry County baffled his neighbors. As one Kentuckian wondered, why would he give up the “glitz and glamour” elsewhere to come back home to farm?

To Kentucky: A Choice of Conviction

Berry and his wife Tanya bought land near where he grew up in the fall of 1964 and then moved to this farm in early July of 1965. It was a less-than-ideal plot for farming. The soil was rocky, the hillside steep and scarred by the previous owner, who had used it to manufacture trailer homes. It sits on the west bank of the Kentucky River. Berry set out to heal it. During his Guggenheim fellowship in Italy, his vision crystallized as he admired the carefully tended countryside—farms cultivated with skill and devotion generation after generation. This experience shaped his imagination for what land in Henry County could become. Together, Tanya and Wendell produced much of the food they consumed—table vegetables from the garden and meat from their flock of sheep. They also sold some sheep, gathered firewood from the surrounding woodland, and grazed their livestock. Berry’s conviction about people and place is robust and layered, and he shares glimpses of it in his fiction, poetry, and essays.

Living a life of conviction was by no means easy; Berry experienced the financial strain of this choice. He sought out a third source of income since farming and writing did not provide enough. Additional income came by way of teaching and lectures. After farming his land for seven years, he shared, “My subsistence farm produces life but no profits, so it is work for nothing.” With three sources of income on a humble budget, Berry does not place his hope in a monetary surplus. Farming his plot in Port Royal opened Berry up to a richer life than the one he could have cultivated in New York City. His affection for people and place—past, present, and future—led him home.

Gene Logsdon: Going Home Again

Berry’s example has been the catalyst for many others to renounce conventional ideas of success and pursue a life of conviction. In 1971, to give one such example, a young journalist named Gene Logsdon noticed the press release for Berry’s Farming: A Handbook, something that could have easily passed him by. Once he received a copy, he flipped it open and discovered, to his surprise, that it was poetry. Intrigued, he read it inquisitively. While working for Farm Journal, the nation’s largest farming periodical, at its headquarters at 230 West Washington Square in downtown Philadelphia, Logsdon found himself caught in the corporate grind—counting down the minutes until the workday ended and unwinding afterward with a few drinks. By all middle-class appearances, Logsdon was right where he should be: in a fine salaried job in the city. But he was ill at ease, having seen firsthand the corrosive effects of corporate America on farming and feeling he was not where he belonged. Berry gave Logsdon the hope that another life might be possible—even if a long shot, he had to find out whether Berry was a serious farmer or merely a writer playing one. He pressed his manager to allow him to interview the Kentucky writer, despite opposition.

His determination paid off: Logsdon won the assignment. He soon set out on a road trip to Port Royal, Kentucky, and, with some luck, found Berry doing chores around his farm. For three hours, Logsdon walked Berry’s farm with him. He pressed Berry to explain why he had traded a rising literary career in New York for a hillside farm in Henry County. “That was what a writer was supposed to do—go to New York.” But he quickly saw it was not where he was to be. He witnessed lives organized around the pursuit of money and put his finger on the core ailment. “The disease of the city is nonentity,” he determined. In fact, “The really amusing thing,” he observed, “is that New York is one of the most provincial places on earth.”

Logsdon’s questions stemmed from his own identification with Berry. He grew up on a farm, excelled in school, receiving a bachelor’s degree at Bellarmine College near Louisville and a master’s degree from Indiana University. His education ushered him to the city, to isolating work, to transient places in pursuit of the corporate idea of success. Berry’s life gave Logsdon the vision to imagine another life for himself. Berry shares in Logsdon’s interview that people from cities come to visit him and want to live and work on a farm, but, like the rich young ruler, do not want to give up their comfort or status. But Logsdon was not like the other visitors Berry received from the city; his life was forever changed that afternoon. His friendship with Berry began during that interview and grew over the decades. Berry’s choice to live and farm where he grew up proved a radical example for Logsdon. Logsdon needed more than books to read or spoken wisdom; he needed to see Berry’s life in action on the farm. Like Berry, Logsdon went on to write about small-scale farming and the responsibility of caring for the land. Decades later Berry wrote two prefaces for his books. Logsdon published a memoir, You Can Go Home Again: Adventures of a Contrary Life, in 1998. The title is a reference to Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), the same line Berry’s New York University faculty supervisor quoted to him when he left for Kentucky. Logsdon writes that after meeting Berry and seeing the life he had made after leaving the city to return home and farm, he vowed to do the same. In a blurb for the memoir, Berry writes, “Gene Logsdon has lived by failing according to most people’s standards of success, and has made a good life.” In 1974, after working nine years at Farm Journal, Logsdon moved his family to a twenty-two-acre farm south of Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

Berry and Success

Berry’s choice to live out of conviction might be more palatable to the general public if he wanted a quiet farm to write on rather than living and working in a city, which is as endearing as nearly every Hallmark movie; but that was not his choice. Berry’s primary work is not writing; his first loyalty is to the land and his community. Such a life confounds conventional assumptions about work, identity, and purpose. In a 2008 interview with The Sun Magazine, Berry perplexed his interviewer, an aspiring writer. When asked about how writers can find success in the face of underemployment, Berry responded: “When I figured out that I could be perfectly happy and not be a writer, I became a better writer.” The interviewer, taken aback, responded, “But you never gave up writing.” To which Berry shared, “No, but I don’t think you ought to let your happiness depend on writing. There are a lot of worthwhile things you can do. The unhappiest people in the world may be the ones who think their happiness depends on artistic success of some kind.” This gets to the heart of the matter: identity is not grounded in accomplishments or money but in convictions, from which the work grows. Berry, unlike the interviewer’s assumption that writing will lead to a job or happiness, puts the work that gained him fame subservient to a deeply rooted conviction. This is provocative: it undermines conventional assumptions woven into our education system, the advice parents give their children, the very story of success shared on social media or among friends, and it turns what people devote their corporate career to on its head.

Spending our days amassing wealth and status orders our ambitions and captures our imaginations. To live otherwise is to resist the dominant story and experience the cost of standing outside of this narrative. But Berry’s life gives us hope that our convictions can be richer than the pursuit of financial security or individual recognition. Too often, our vision of thriving begins and ends with money. Through his fiction and poetry, Berry offers glimpses of another way. A life he himself lives, clear-eyed about its hardships. In “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Berry offers these words:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Each day presents new opportunities—large and small—to act on the conviction that personal comfort or prestige are worth sacrificing for more precious goods.

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Further Reading

Wendell Berry. “A Native Hill.” Recollected Essays, 1965–1980. North Point Press, 1981.

Wendell Berry. Interview. Conversations with Kentucky Writers, edited by Linda Beattie. University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

Clare Ellis. “The Enduring Appeal of Wendell Berry.” Deep Rooted, Stone Pier Press (Substack), 2025.

Jeff Fearnside. “Wendell Berry on Small Farms, Local Wisdom, and the Folly of Greed.” The Sun Magazine, 2008.

Gene Logsdon. “Wendell Berry.” Farm Journal, July 1972.

Gene Logsdon. You Can Go Home Again: Adventures of a Contrary Life. University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Wallace Stegner. “A Letter to Wendell Berry.” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. Random House, 1992.

Image Credit: James Baker Hall