Reading List

Authors Like Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry wrote by hand. In his essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” he explained that his wife, Tanya, typed his work, and saw no need for a machine. From the mid-1960s he farmed Lanes Landing, a hillside farm in Henry County, Kentucky, where he was born, and across six decades invented Port William, a river town whose barber, farmers and widows carry novels such as Jayber Crow (2000) and Hannah Coulter (2004). The Unsettling of America (1977) argued that industrial agriculture was ruining farm families as well as the soil. He died on 31 August 2026, aged 92, and Dispatches from Rural America, sixteen previously unpublished essays, followed from Counterpoint on 27 October. The ten writers below share his ground: farms and small places, the bonds between people and land, and what is lost when people leave.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Agrarian writing · Small-town fiction · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Wendell Berry, start with Kent Haruf, whose novels set in the invented plains town of Holt, Colorado, are the nearest thing to Port William, and Marilynne Robinson, whose Gilead (2004) shares his faith and his small-town patience. For the farm itself, read James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life (2015). The list also includes a critic who would have questioned Berry’s nostalgia.

10 authors like Wendell Berry

01
An invented rural county

Thomas Hardy

British · Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895)

Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840, the son of a stonemason, and trained as an architect. His novels are set in Wessex, his name for the south-west of England, among farmers, shepherds and labourers whose way of life was changing with the railways and new machinery. After the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure he concentrated on poetry. He died in 1928.

Hardy invented a whole rural county, as Berry did with Port William, and wrote its people with the same respect for their work. He is far darker about what the land and fate do to them.

— Lisanne

Every book by Thomas Hardy →

02
A life on the land, remembered

Willa Cather

American · O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918)

Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved with her family to Nebraska at nine, settling in Red Cloud. My Ántonia is narrated by a man remembering a Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie; Death Comes for the Archbishop follows two French priests in New Mexico. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours. She died in 1947.

Cather wrote farming families on the prairie as lives worth a whole novel, and My Ántonia, like Hannah Coulter, is a woman’s life on the land told through memory.

— Lisanne

Every book by Willa Cather →

03
Berry’s teacher

Wallace Stegner

American · Angle of Repose (1971), Crossing to Safety (1987)

Stegner (1909–1993) grew up moving around the American and Canadian West and founded the creative writing programme at Stanford, where Berry was one of his students. Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972; it was based on the letters of the writer Mary Hallock Foote and took passages from them without credit, which has caused controversy ever since.

Stegner shared Berry’s conservationist convictions and his belief that a region deserves serious fiction. Crossing to Safety has the same long, patient view of friendship and marriage.

— Lisanne

Every book by Wallace Stegner →

04
The argument with nostalgia

Raymond Williams

Welsh · Border Country (1960), The Country and the City (1973)

Williams (1921–1988) was the son of a railway signalman in Pandy, on the Welsh border, and became a Cambridge professor and one of Britain’s most influential critics. The Country and the City traces English writing about rural life back through the centuries and finds, in each generation, writers mourning a golden age just behind them.

Read Williams as the argument with Berry: he shows how often writers have lamented a vanishing countryside, and asks who did the work in the version they remember. He shares Berry’s anger at what capitalism did to rural life but is warier of nostalgia.

— Lisanne
05
Among peasant farmers

John Berger

British · Ways of Seeing (1972), Pig Earth (1979)

Berger was born in London in 1926 and won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G. In the 1970s he moved to Quincy, a village in the French Alps, and lived among its farmers for decades; Pig Earth, the first book of his trilogy Into Their Labours, is made of stories and poems about their work. He died in 2017.

Berger lived the life Berry argued for and wrote about peasant farming as a culture, not a backwater. He is a Marxist where Berry is a Christian agrarian, yet they reach strikingly similar conclusions about land and work.

— Lisanne

Every book by John Berger →

06
The poet of staying put

Gary Snyder

American · Riprap (1959), Turtle Island (1974)

Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930, worked as a logger and fire lookout, and studied Zen Buddhism in Japan. Turtle Island, poems and prose about living in one place in the Sierra Nevada foothills, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. His decades of letters with Berry were published as Distant Neighbors in 2014.

Snyder is Berry’s nearest counterpart among poets: both argue for staying put, knowing a place and working it. The difference is faith; Snyder’s is Zen Buddhism, Berry’s a Christian sense of the land as a gift.

— Lisanne

Every book by Gary Snyder →

07
Port William on the plains

Kent Haruf

American · Plainsong (1999), Benediction (2013), Our Souls at Night (2015)

Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1943, the son of a Methodist minister, and earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1973. His novels are set in Holt, an invented town on the Colorado plains; Plainsong was a National Book Award finalist. Our Souls at Night was published after his death in 2014.

Holt is the nearest thing in American fiction to Port William: an invented small town, plain sentences and neighbours who look after each other. Haruf’s books are shorter and quieter, with less argument about farming.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kent Haruf →

08
Kentucky roots, local food

Barbara Kingsolver

American · Prodigal Summer (2000), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007), Demon Copperhead (2022)

Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky; she now lives on a farm in south-west Virginia. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle records a year in which her family ate only what they grew or could buy locally. Demon Copperhead, set in Appalachia during the opioid crisis, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023.

Kingsolver comes from Berry’s state and shares his case for local food and small farms. Her Appalachia is poorer and more damaged than Port William, and her politics more openly progressive.

— Lisanne

Every book by Barbara Kingsolver →

09
Faith in a small town

Marilynne Robinson

American · Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004)

Robinson was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1943 and taught for many years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Gilead, written as a letter from an elderly Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town to his young son, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005.

Robinson shares Berry’s Christian seriousness, his patience with ordinary small-town lives and his suspicion of modern economics. Gilead and Jayber Crow are both meditations on a life lived in one place.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marilynne Robinson →

10
A working farmer’s case

James Rebanks

English · The Shepherd’s Life (2015), English Pastoral (2020)

Rebanks was born in 1974 into a family of sheep farmers in the Lake District, left school at sixteen to work on the farm and later took a double first in history at Oxford. The Shepherd’s Life follows a year of farming Herdwick sheep on the fells; English Pastoral tells how his grandfather’s way of farming gave way to industrial methods, and how he set about restoring his land.

The nearest living writer to Berry’s essays: a working farmer arguing, from his own fields, against industrial agriculture. Rebanks is less certain than Berry and more practical about what a modern farm can do.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Wendell Berry

If you loved Jayber Crow, read Kent Haruf.

Plainsong: a small town on the Colorado plains, and the neighbours who step in.

If you loved Hannah Coulter, read Willa Cather.

My Ántonia: a woman’s life on the prairie, remembered.

If you loved The Unsettling of America, read James Rebanks.

English Pastoral: one farm, three generations and the cost of industrial farming.

If you want an argument with Berry, read Raymond Williams.

The Country and the City: why every generation mourns the countryside.

If you want more Berry, start with Jayber Crow.

Then read Hannah Coulter (2004) and the essays in The Unsettling of America (1977); his final essays, Dispatches from Rural America, appeared in October 2026.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Wendell Berry

Who writes like Wendell Berry?

Kent Haruf, Marilynne Robinson and James Rebanks are the closest. Haruf and Robinson write small towns with Berry’s patience, and Rebanks writes from his own farm against industrial agriculture.

What should I read after Jayber Crow?

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong (1999) are both quiet novels of lives lived in one small town.

Is Wendell Berry still alive?

No. Wendell Berry died on 31 August 2026, aged 92, in Henry County, Kentucky, where he had lived and farmed for most of his life.

Does Wendell Berry have a new book?

Yes. Dispatches from Rural America, a collection of sixteen previously unpublished essays, was published by Counterpoint on 27 October 2026, after his death. His most recent novel is Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story (2025).

Is Wendell Berry like Barbara Kingsolver?

In part. Both have Kentucky roots and argue for local food and small farms, but Kingsolver’s fiction, such as Demon Copperhead (2022), is set in a poorer, more damaged Appalachia.

Which Wendell Berry book should I read first?

Jayber Crow (2000) is the usual way into Port William. For the essays, start with The Unsettling of America (1977).

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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