Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781682262276)

"A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry."

-Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature

Sarah Neidhardt grew up in the woods. When she was an infant, her parents left behind comfortable, urbane lives to take part in the back-to-the-land movement. They moved their young family to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks where they built a cabin, grew crops, and strove for eight years to live self-sufficiently.

In this vivid memoir Neidhardt explores her childhood in wider familial and social contexts. Drawing upon a trove of family letters and other archival material, she follows her parents' journey from privilege to food stamps-from their formative youths, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society-and explores the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s as it was, and as she lived it.

A story of strangers in a strange land, of class, marriage, and family in a changing world, Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods is part childhood idyll, part cautionary tale. Sarah Neidhardt reveals the treasures and tolls of unconventional, pastoral lives, and her insightful reflections offer a fresh perspective on what it means to aspire to pre-industrial lifestyles in a modern world.


Author: Sarah Neidhardt
ISBN-10: 1682262278
ISBN-13: 9781682262276
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Language: English
Published: 03/07/2023
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.98lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.68d