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

Front Cover
University of Georgia Press, 2007 - 332 pages
Our current less-is-more impulse may have contemporary trappings, says David E. Shi, but the underlying ideal has been around for centuries. From Puritans and Quakers to Boy Scouts and hippies, our quest for the simple life is an enduring, complex tradition in American culture. Looking across more than three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, Shi introduces a rich cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Scott and Helen Nearing, and Jimmy Carter.

In the diversity of their aspirations and failings, Shi finds that nothing is simple about our mercurial devotion to the ideal of plain living and high thinking. "Difficult choices are the price of simplicity," he writes in the book's revised epilogue. We may hedge a bit in the practice of simple living, and now and then we are driven by motives no deeper than nostalgia. Shi stresses, however, 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
TWO The Quaker Ethic
28
THREE Republican Simplicity
50
FOUR Republicanism Transformed
74
SEVEN Patrician Simplicity At Bay
154
EIGHT Progressive Simplicity
175
NINE Prosperity Depression
215
TEN Affluence and Anxiety
248
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About the author (2007)

David E. Shi is the president of Furman University, where he is also a professor of history. His books include In Search of the Simple Life, Facing Facts, and The Bell Tower and Beyond.

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