Wendell Berry, Kentucky-born author who advocated a simpler life, has died at 92

Wendell Berry, Kentucky-born author who advocated a simpler life, has died at 92 1 of 4 | Author Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File) 2 of 4 | Kentucky author and poet Wendell Berry reads about himself, Feb. 14, 2011, in Frankfort, Ky. (AP Photo/The Independent, John Flavell, File) 3 of 4 | President Barack Obama presents a National Humanities Medal to poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist, Wendell E. Berry, March 2, 2011, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File) 4 of 4 | Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File) 1 of 4 | Author Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File) 1 of 4 Author Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File) Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Share 2 of 4 | Kentucky author and poet Wendell Berry reads about himself, Feb. 14, 2011, in Frankfort, Ky. (AP Photo/The Independent, John Flavell, File) 2 of 4 Kentucky author and poet Wendell Berry reads about himself, Feb. 14, 2011, in Frankfort, Ky. (AP Photo/The Independent, John Flavell, File) Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Share 3 of 4 | President Barack Obama presents a National Humanities Medal to poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist, Wendell E. Berry, March 2, 2011, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File) 3 of 4 President Barack Obama presents a National Humanities Medal to poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist, Wendell E. Berry, March 2, 2011, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File) Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Share 4 of 4 | Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File) 4 of 4 Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File) Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Share Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] NEW YORK (AP) — 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.His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed on Monday that he died in his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.“There’s not enough I could say about him to do him justice,” she told The Associated Press.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. “Increasingly 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,” he wrote in “Andy Catlett: Early Travels,” a novel published in 2006, “and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater.”“The 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’s work.”