what distinction did achieve in 1934
Answers
Explanation:
Born in 1934 amid the Great Depression, Wendell was the first of four children born to Virginia Erdman and John Marshall Berry. His parents came from farming families. His mother had been to college and was a great reader. While working on the congressional staff of Virgil Chapman, later a U.S. senator, his father attended law school. But instead of becoming a big-city lawyer, he returned to Kentucky to farm while also continuing to work for the New Deal. In the 1930s, John Marshall Berry helped set up a thirteen-state marketing cooperative for tobacco farmers—a cooperative that lasted for many years, and for which both Wendell’s father and, later on, his brother John Marshall Berry Jr., served as president.
Wendell grew up in Newcastle, Kentucky, working on his father’s farm and neighboring farms. He attended the Millersburg Military Institute and then the University of Kentucky, where he earned his Master’s and met Tanya Amyx. The first time he saw Tanya, Berry recently told Jim Leach in an interview in HUMANITIES magazine, she was standing in Miller Hall by a wooden post. Years later, after the university decided to renovate the hall, the wooden newel post ended up in the Berry family home, on the first floor, this symbol of their long union the first thing a visitor sees when entering their home. In addition to a literary career resulting in more than fifty books, in which Tanya has always played an important editorial role, their partnership has yielded two children, five grandchildren, and one great grandchild.
After studying at Kentucky, Berry became a creative writing fellow in the Wallace Stegner writing program at Stanford University where he worked alongside Ernest J. Gaines, Ken Kesey, and several other writers who went on to achieve renown. Stegner supported Berry’s career in numerous ways, not least by his example as a writer of significant literary and moral ambition who devoted much of his life’s work to a place: its natural environment, its people, and its history. After Stanford, Berry started on what promised to be an itinerant existence as a professor of writing and literature, visiting Tuscany for a year as a Guggenheim fellow and then teaching at New York University for two years. An invitation to teach at the University of Kentucky, however, carried him back home. He bought a farm near Port Royal, on land adjacent to a farm that had been in his mother’s family, and pursued his vocation as a writer.
Another important example for Berry’s work was fellow Kentuckian Harry Caudill, whose elegies for the people and culture along the Cumberland Plateau are layered with a grave sense of injustice at the industrial exploitation of the region. Berry feels an affinity with artists whose work was dedicated to their home landscapes, like Thoreau in Concord or Cézanne in Provence or William Carlos Williams in New Jersey. He moves easily between poetry, fiction, and essays. But among his disparate efforts, continuity can be found. Whether in a verse concerning a yellow-throated warbler perched on a sycamore branch, or in his fictional stories of the people and times of small-town Port William, or in his essays discussing the dangers of erosion and pollution, there are several constants: admiration for nature’s ingenuity, respect for locals and local knowledge, and a deeply Christian appreciation for our obligations to each other.