The farmer-writer Wendell Berry will deliver the 41st annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Monday. The lecture, to be given on April 23 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, is considered the federal government’s most prestigious honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.
Since his first novel, “Nathan Coulter,” was published in 1960, Mr. Berry, who farms 125 acres near Port Royal, Ky., with his wife, Tanya Berry, has established himself as a principled and sometimes cantankerous presence in American letters, as known for his advocacy for traditional agriculture and the virtues of rural life and small-scale community as for his more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and essays. He has been an outspoken critic not just of industrialized farming but of industrialized writing, once declaring that writing on a computer instead of his old Royal typewriter would make his work dependent on strip-mined coal. “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work,” he wrote in a 1987 essay.
Mr. Berry, 77, has also been a particularly fierce critic of mountaintop-removal mining. In 2009 withdrew his donation of his personal papers from the University of Kentucky after the university decided to name a basketball players’ dormitory the Wildcat Coal Lodge, in honor of a coal company that had helped raise money for the building.
Tickets to the Jefferson lecture are free and can be requested online.
An earlier version of this post misidentified the agency that chose Wendell Berry to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. It was the National Endowment for the Humanities, not the National Endowment for the Arts.