Community within Nature: Culture and Environment in the Chimney Farm Literature of Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth, 1944-48

Abstract

In the nature section of used bookstores, readers interested in back-to-the-land movements are sometimes surprised to find the longevity of this impulse. The wish to leave the urban environment for the countryside, and to write about it, has been a strong desire in American culture. No matter what decade, the overall theme of these books remains remarkably similar: an over-arching antimodernist appeal to middle-class urbanites concerned with unchecked industrial growth, urban sprawl, and the fast pace of modern living. And yet, this dominant focus overshadows other possible means of interpreting these texts. In the 1940s, writers Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth, among others, moved beyond simple condemnation of modernism to embrace concern for the environment; to a significant degree, this revolt against modernism helped set the stage for the modern environmental movement. Having its roots in the late nineteenth century, back-to-the-land literature displayed an interest in physical renewal through nature. In the post-Civil War era, vacationing urbanites or “rusticators” sought respite from early industrialization by renting or purchasing cabins in the secluded areas of the Northeast and across the nation. In the early 1900s, this literature maintained connections to the Country Life Movement that encouraged urbanites to take extended vacations at farm boarding houses and to purchase debilitated farmsteads. In the 1930s, popular “how to” books such as Ralph Borsodi's Flight from the City (1933) and M.G. Kains's Five Acres and Independence (1935) aimed to instill the virtues of a marginally self-sufficient lifestyle into urban populations. Celebration of the rural through regionalist and agrarian movements was in full bloom, even as the Great Depression rocked the nation.