Bøker i Ozarks Studies-serien

Provides a fascinating look at a neighbourhood in the Missouri Ozarks from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Down on Mahans Creek tells the dynamic story of this distinctive neighbourhood navigating the push and pull of the old and new ways of life.

The job of regional literature is twofold: to explore and confront the culture from within, and to help define that culture for outsiders. Taken together, the two centuries of Ozarks literature collected in this ambitious anthology do just that.

Counterculture flourished across the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Off the beaten path in the Arkansas Ozarks a faction of back to the landers were quietly creating their own counterculture haven. Jared Phillips collects oral histories and delves into archival resources to provide a fresh scholarly discussion of this group.

"A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry."-Wendy J. Fox, Electric LiteratureSarah 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.