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.
Sarah Neidhardt has worked as a bookseller, secretary, paralegal, copyeditor, and stay-at-home mother. She grew up in Arkansas and Northern California and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and teenage son. She is a graduate of Oberlin College.
Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods is part of the Ozarks Studies series from the University of Arkansas Press. Edited by Brooks Blevins, The Ozarks Studies series acknowledges the awakening of a scholarly Ozarks studies movement—one that crosses disciplinary boundaries as it approaches regional study from a variety of vantage points—and positions the University of Arkansas Press as the publisher at the forefront of the movement. As the only university press headquartered within the Ozarks region and as a press with a solid background in the publication of books on the region—Rafferty’s The Ozarks, Land and Life, Morrow’s Shepherd of the Hills Country, Harper’s White Man’s Heaven, Sizemore’s Ozark Vernacular Houses, and many more—the University of Arkansas Press is ideally suited for the first series that will level a scholarly eye on the Ozarks and Ozarkers.
Twenty Acres will be published in April, 2023.