The good life of Helen K. Nearing

"In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Helen and Scott Nearing moved from their small apartment in New York City to a dilapidated farmhouse on sixty-five acres in Vermont. For over twenty years, they created fertile, organic gardens, handcrafted stone buildings, and practiced living simply on the land. In 1952, they moved to the Maine coast, where they later built what became their last stone home. Through sixty years of living on the land in rural New England - during which time they were committed to social and economic justice, wrote numerous books and articles, and shared time with thousands of visitors to their homestead - the Nearings embodied a philosophy that now is recognized as a centerpiece of America's Back-to-the-Land and Simple Living movements." "Although both Nearings wrote a variety of autobiographical works, this is the first comprehensive biography of Helen Knothe Nearing (1904-1995). Killinger begins with a look at Helen's spiritual formation as a member of the early-twentieth-century Theosophical Society in Europe, India, and Australia. She examines Helen's complex relationship to Old Left socialist Scott Nearing (whom she meets in 1928 and marries in 1948) and describes in vivid detail their lives together first in New York City and later as pioneer homesteaders in Vermont (in the 1930s and 40s) and Maine (from 1952 until the ends of their lives)." "While remaining deeply respectful of her subject, Killinger brings to light some of the central paradoxes of Helen Nearing's life. Her free-spirited resistance to traditional female norms did not prevent marriage to an austere Communist old enough to be her father. The Nearings' door was always open despite Helen's dislike of and impatience with "company." And her abiding belief in living the principles of a simple "good life" did not impede her willingness or her ability to market those principles with great success. As Killinger shows, Helen Nearing almost single-handedly created the Nearing mythos, still very much a factor in the ongoing interest in this couple."--BOOK JACKET.