Scholar Mimi Killinger researched the life of homesteader and writer Helen Nearing for her doctoral dissertation in American History. Her dissertation became the biography The Good Life of Helen K. Nearing (University of Vermont Press, 2007). Here, Killinger recounts the inspiration for her project at the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, and reads excerpts from the biography. Killinger earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maine, where she is now Rezendes Preceptor for the Arts at the Honors College.
To learn more about the Nearings, visit the Good Life Center or the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.
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Talking Back to the Maine Humanities Council Podcast
This project is supported by a special Digital Humanities Start-Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. If you have any questions, please contact Brita Zitin at (207) 773-5051.
1 comment:
I enjoyed this story very much and have always thought that this type of life only can be self created once the rat race works you over enough. As any life style change sucess was tempered by the same old, same old, money.
There was always an under laying support that helped Helen and Scott exist it was'nt just living of vegatables and hard work. These type of individuals are the smart ones that intelectualy out witt the every day trapping of debt and the corporate systems adjenda. Although they did work very hard by doing their share of hard work. I find the very notion that this can be achieved has left an indalable scare on my mind. The similarities leading to the depression of the dirty thirties and the market swings on Wall Stree this year with its phony money market system of stocks and sub prime failures perhaps like the early thirties when Helen and Scott found their first homestead, we might see more people out of necessity returning to this way of life as a better choice than the slavery of the modern 9 to 5 rat race. This sane way to live is the way we were ment to exist.
Canadian Beef
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