Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

A brief meditation on the role of technology in his own life and how it has changed the landscape of the United States from "America's greatest philosopher on sustainable life and living" (Chicago Tribune)

"A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones."

Wendell Berry first challenged the idea that our advanced technological age is a good thing when he penned "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" in the late 1980s for Harper's Magazine, galvanizing a critical reaction eclipsing any the magazine had seen before. He followed by responding with "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine." Both essays are collected in one short volume for the first time.

WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among other distinctions. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.