WENDELL BERRY

Wendell Berry has been called a prophet and a visionary, but he has about as much use for such lofty praise as he does for screens. He doesn’t own a cell phone or a computer. An essayist, fiction writer, poet, and small-farms advocate, Berry does possess a National Humanities Medal, which President Obama presented him in 2011, as well as a slew of other honors and the adulation of people around the world who admire him not only for his tremendous body of work but also for his activism and uncompromised truth telling.

Since his debut in 1960, he has published prodigiously. “Let’s say a lot. Or: too many,” Berry says, when asked how many books he has written. Among his works are masterpieces such as his poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” his novels Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, and hugely influential nonfiction such as What Are People For? and Home Economics. He is currently working on a new book that his publisher says may be seen as an update of his 1977 classic, The Unsettling of America.

Now eighty-five, Berry