The world has mourned the loss of one its great literary giants with the recent passing of Wendell Berry… author, farmer, conservationist… on August 31. The staff at the Foundation has joined the world to grieve as we understand his significance and also know the special friendship that existed between Wendell Berry and James Baker Hall.
We send out thoughts of comfort to the Berry family.
Wendell Berry and James Baker Hall met in 1954 as undergraduates at the University of Kentucky and were friends over the next 55 years until Jim’s death in 2009. In his 2010 publication Imagination In Place, Wendell’s chapter on Jim calls him my first literary friend.” The two were among the four UK students to receive Stegner Creative Writing Fellowships at Stanford University in the early 1960s (Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman the other two students.)
Each of the four continued on their own trajectory after Stanford which took them far from Kentucky; San Francisco, New York, Paris, Italy, Storrs, Greece. One by one each of them returned to their roots in Kentucky, Wendell the first, returning from NYU to Henry County in 1964. Bobbi Ann Mason also left after graduation for New York, returning to Kentucky many years later. Together, they became known as Kentucky’s “Fab Five”, the famous group of writers from UK.
The world has mourned the loss of one its great literary giants with the recent passing of Wendell Berry… author, farmer, conservationist… on August 31. The staff at the Foundation has joined the world to grieve as we understand his significance and also know the special friendship that existed between Wendell Berry and James Baker Hall.
We send out thoughts of comfort to the Berry family.
Wendell Berry and James Baker Hall met in 1954 as undergraduates at the University of Kentucky and were friends over the next 55 years until Jim’s death in 2009. In his 2010 publication Imagination In Place, Wendell’s chapter on Jim calls him my first literary friend.” The two were among the four UK students to receive Stegner Creative Writing Fellowships at Stanford University in the early 1960s (Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman the other two students.)
Each of the four continued on their own trajectory after Stanford which took them far from Kentucky; San Francisco, New York, Paris, Italy, Storrs, Greece. One by one each of them returned to their roots in Kentucky, Wendell the first, returning from NYU to Henry County in 1964. Bobbi Ann Mason also left after graduation for New York, returning to Kentucky many years later. Together, they became known as Kentucky’s “Fab Five”, the famous group of writers from UK.
