Helen Nearing

Helen Knothe Nearing (February 23, 1904 – September 17, 1995) was an American author and advocate of simple living.

Helen Knothe was the daughter of Frank Knothe who had a clothing business in New Jersey. She grew up in an economically comfortable family of Theosophists.

As a young woman, she had a romantic relationship with Jiddu Krishnamurti.

She and Scott Nearing started a relationship in 1928 and married nearly 20 years later, on December 12, 1947. The couple lived in rural Vermont where they grew much of their food and erected nine stone buildings over the course of two decades. They earned money by producing maple syrup and sugar from the trees on their land and from Scott Nearing's occasional paid lectures.

In 1952, Helen and Scott Nearing moved to a homestead in Brooksville, Maine, on Cape Rosier, where they continued growing much of their own food. They cultivated blueberries as a cash crop.

Helen Nearing died in 1995 as the result of a single-car accident in Harborside, Maine.

Published works

• The Good Life Picture Album (1974)
• Simple Food for the Good Life (1980)
• Wise Words for the Good Life (1980)
• Our Home Made of Stone (1983)
• Loving and Leaving the Good Life (1992)
• Light on Aging and Dying (1995)

Co-authored with Scott Nearing

• The Maple Sugar Book: being a plain practical account of the Art of Sugaring designed to promote an acquaintance with the Ancient as well as the Modern practise, together with remarks on Pioneering as a way of living in the twentieth century. New York: John Day Co., 1950.
• Living the Good Life (1954) ISBN 0-88365-236-6
• Socialists Around the World (1958)
• Building and Using Our Sun-Heated Greenhouse (1977)
• Continuing the Good Life (1979)
• The Good Life (1989)

External links

• The Scott & Helen Nearing Papers at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods