Wendell Erdman Berry (born 5 August 1934 in Louisville, Kentucky; died 31 August 2026 in Port Royal, Kentucky) farmed the same Henry County hillside he wrote about for more than half a century. He is best known for The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981), and for the Port William novels including Jayber Crow (2000) — a body of work built on the idea that land, community and economy are one subject, not three. His 1971 essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, written as the valley faced being drowned by a dam, contains the sentence researchers now regard as this quotation’s starting point.