The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture

Front Cover
University of Georgia Press, 2001 - 332 pages
Looking across three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, this work introduces a cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Scott and Helen Nearing, Jimmy Carter and Jane Addams. It finds that nothing is simple about our mercurial devotion to the ideal of plain living and high thinking. Though we may hedge a bit in practice and are now and then driven by motives no deeper than nostalgia, this work stresses that the diverse efforts to avoid anxious social striving and compulsive materialism have been essential to the nation's spiritual health.
 

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Contents

Introduction
3
The Puritan Way
8
The Quaker Ethic
28
Republican Simplicity
50
Republicanism Transformed
74
Simplicity Domesticated
100
Transcendental Simplicity
125
Patrician Simplicity At Bay
154
Progressive Simplicity
175
Prosperity Depression and Simplicity
215
Affluence and Anxiety
248
Epilogue
277
Notes
283
Index
325
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