Sewanee's first year students will arrive on
campus this month ready to discuss the works of Wendell Berry during
the orientation program, which begins on the 21st.
Wendell
Berry, who has been called the prophet of rural America, by the New
York Times, was on Sewanee's campus in April as part of the "How,
Then, Shall We Live?" lecture series. His work will serve as the
focal point for campus-wide discussions, and should help to foster a
dialogue among the incoming first year students about issues of
mutual concern. Students have already submitted short essays on the
Berry work they chose to read. These essays will serve as the start
of a dialogue during orientation.
Berry was born in 1934, in
Henry County, Kentucky, where he now lives and farms 125 acres that
has been in his family since the early 1800s. Central to his writing
is his defense of the spiritual and ethical values embedded in
traditional rural life and his sustained critique of global
capitalism and consumerism. True to his principles, he plows his
land with draft horses and refuses to write with a computer.
Former professor of English at the University of Kentucky,
Berry is winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller
Fellowship, the T.S. Eliot Award, the National Institute and Academy
of Arts and Letters Award, and the Sewanee Review's Aiken Taylor
Award.
