Loving and Leaving The Good Life

This is one of my favorite books at the moment. It’s essentially an autobiography of Helen (and Scott) Nearing, famous before-their-time back-to-the-landers, vegetarians, and intellectual, and authors of Living the Good Life.

Helen and Scott went “back to the land” during the Depression, moving from New York City to rural Vermont. Scott was a professor who was basically barred from teaching in universities in the U.S. because of his “radical” views on child labor (he was against) and his opposition to the first World War. Helen, an accomplished violinist about 20 years his junior, grew up in a comfortable Theosophist family in New Jersey and spent a time in her teens as a companion of Krishnamurti.

Living the Good Life is about the Vermont project. It discusses Scott and Helen’s general philosophy, the vegetarian diet, raw foods, stone house building, greenhouses, etc. Loving and Leaving The Good Life is a much more personal account of Scott and Helen’s lives, and their life together, including their time in Vermont and later in rural Maine. It’s also the story of Scott’s death, by voluntary starvation, at just over 100.

If you enjoy this book, you might want to check out Helen’s Simple Food for the Good Life, an unconventional, simple cookbook from a woman who never wanted to cook but ended up feeding thousands of visitors.