The Unsettling of America (50th Anniversary Edition)

Culture and Agriculture

Paperback
$20.00 US
On sale Aug 25, 2026 | 256 Pages | 9781640098374

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A landmark work of environmental writing that powerfully argues that our estrangement from the land through industrial farming is a cultural and spiritual crisis—now presented in a beautiful fiftieth anniversary edition featuring a new foreword by the author

Since its original publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. And it is perhaps more relevant than ever, as today’s agribusiness has wrested the cultural and spiritual disclipine of farming even farther from its cultural context and the family’s that practice it. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.

Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Wendell Berry writes, there are people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.
WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among other distinctions. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.

About

A landmark work of environmental writing that powerfully argues that our estrangement from the land through industrial farming is a cultural and spiritual crisis—now presented in a beautiful fiftieth anniversary edition featuring a new foreword by the author

Since its original publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. And it is perhaps more relevant than ever, as today’s agribusiness has wrested the cultural and spiritual disclipine of farming even farther from its cultural context and the family’s that practice it. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.

Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Wendell Berry writes, there are people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.

Author

WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among other distinctions. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.