Overview

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 65 acres in Vermont. For over 20 years, they created 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 their 60 years of living on the land in rural New England, their commitment to social and economic justice, their numerous books and articles, and the time they shared 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 examines Helen's spiritual formation as a member of the early-20th-century Theosophical Society, her complex relationship to old left socialist Scott Nearing, and their lives together first in New York City and later as pioneer homesteaders in Vermont and then in Maine. Although deeply respectful of her subject, Killinger brings to light some of the central paradoxes of Helen Nearing's life. The Nearings' door was always open despite Helen's impatience with company. And her abiding belief in living the principles of a simple good life did not impede her willingness and ability to market those principles with great success. As Killinger shows, Helen K. Nearing almost single-handedly created the Nearing mythos, still very much a factor in the ongoing interest in this remarkable couple.

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9781584656289

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Helen K. Nearing . . . with her hustband Scott Nearing, were among the most influential proponents of what has come to be known as the back-to-the-land movement. One can't help but admire their ferocious self-determination and integrity, even if one recoils slightly from the chill of their aesthetic purity. --Valley News

Long before it was fashionable, Helen Knothe and Scott Nearing practiced the Spartan tenets of self-sufficiency by homesteading their extensive properties, first in Vermont and then along the Maine coast, where their strict, almost militant adherence to the principles of organic farming, vegetarianism, recycling, and pacifism were translated into and then calculatedly marketed as the underpinnings of a return-to-nature philosophy they termed the 'good life.' Although the Nearings themselves wrote numerous books detailing the genesis and mastery of this mode of living, these hugely popular treatises were self-congratulatory, idealistic renditions that neglected to fully credit the contributions others made to their purportedly independent lifestyle. Killinger's masterful biography not only corrects the record, it cunningly reveals Helen's early devotion to theosophy and the occult, sheds light on the mystical origins of Helen's romantic devotion to the older, domineering, and philander

Author Information

Margaret O. Killinger is an adjunct assistant professor in the Honors College at the University of Maine, Orono.

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