Helen Knothe Nearing (1904 - 1995)

Genre: Non-Fiction

Helen Nearing was born in Ridgewood, NJ, the middle child of intellectual middle-class parents. Helen travelled widely as a child and teenager, took music lessons, and was well-educated. Her early life is described in detail in her book Loving and Leaving the Good Life.

Helen met Scott Nearing briefly in 1921, then again in 1928, and they were together from that time on, only marrying in 1947 when Scott's first wife, Nellie Seeds, from whom he was separated, died. They left New York City in 1932 to live in rural southern Vermont, where they homesteaded and ran a maple-sugaring business for 19 years. They moved to Harborside, Maine, in 1952, where they again built their own house and outbuildings and began a business raising blueberries. Their homesteading days are also well-chronicled in their books.

The Nearings names are on a bronze plaque around the Pacifist Memorial at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Mass. Their home in Harborside, Forest Farm, is now the Good Life Center, which hosts Monday night meetings, free tours, and workshops. For more info, call 207.326.8211.

Books written by Helen Nearing include:

• The Good Life Album of Helen and Scott Nearing (1974; with photos of the Nearings together and apart)
• Simple Food for the Good Life (1980/1999; part vegetarian cookbook, part philosophy; forward by Barbara Damrosch)
• Wise Words on the Good Life: An Anthology of Quotations (1980; republished 1999 as Wise Words on the Good Life: A Homesteader's Personal Collection)
• Our Home Made of Stone: Building in our 70s and 90s (1983; a large picture book)
• The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living (1989)
• Loving and Leaving the Good Life (1992/1993; an excerpt from Loving is available on-line)
• Light on Aging and Dying: Wise Words (1995/1997/1998)

Books co-authored by Scott and Helen Nearing:

• The Maple Sugar Book (1950/1970/1999)
• Living the Good Life (1954/1970/1974; on the Nearings' life in Vermont)
• USA Today: Educational Excursions Through Darkest America (1955)
• The Brave New World (1958; on Russia and China)
• Socialists Around the World (1958)
• The Right To Travel (1959)
• Building and Using Our Sun-Heated Greenhouse: Grow Vegetables Year-Round (1977)
• Continuing the Good Life: Half A Century of Homesteading (1979; their life in Maine)

Scott and Helen also wrote a regular Mother Earth News column in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jean Hay's Web site contains an article about being the Nearings' close neighbour. A video about Helen Nearing has been produced, and she recorded a 90-minute audiotape in 1994 called The Good Life of Helen Nearing. Ellen LaConte, who spent a lot of time with Helen in her later years, published a book about her called On Light Alone (1996). Two articles by Helen, "At the End of A Good Life" and "Going It Alone," are available on-line, through In Context magazine.


Last Update: 06/04/2007

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