Almost every American who has ever stood in a supermarket aisle and felt an unease about how food arrives there already knows Wendell Berry, even if they have never opened one of his books. His saying “eating is an agricultural act” sounded like common sense until you noticed how much of modern life had been arranged to make you forget it.

Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer who spent six decades insisting that culture and agriculture were the same word split by an accident of spelling, died on Aug. 31 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. Wendell Erdman Berry was born in Louisville on Aug. 5, 1934, and grew up in Henry County, where his family had farmed since the early 19th century. After an education that left him suspicious of institutionalized power, he earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky. In 1958 he won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, in a workshop that included Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry. A Guggenheim year in Italy and France followed, then a teaching post at New York University. Friends warned that leaving Manhattan for a Kentucky hillside would be literary suicide. In 1964 he left anyway, bought a neglected farm along the Kentucky River, and moved there with his family the following year.