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Cover of The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Last American Man

  • 280 pages · about 5 hours
  • First published 2002
  • 9 editions

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1 About this book

At the age of seventeen, Eustace Conway ditched the comforts of his suburban existence to escape to the wild. Away from the crushing disapproval of his father, he lived alone in a teepee in the mountains. Everything he needed he built, grew or killed. He made his clothes from deer he killed and skinned before using their sinew as sewing thread.

But he didn't stop there. In the years that followed, he stopped at nothing in pursuit of bigger, bolder challenges. He travelled the Mississippi in a handmade wooden canoe; he walked the two-thousand-mile Appalachian Trail; he hiked across the German Alps in trainers; he scaled cliffs in New Zealand.

One Christmas, he finished dinner with his family and promptly upped and left – to ride his horse across America. From South Carolina to the Pacific, with his little brother in tow, they dodged cars on the highways, ate road kill and slept on the hard ground.

  • Wilderness survival
  • Outdoor life
  • Biography & autobiography
  • Simplicity
  • Men
  • American National characteristics
  • Appalachian mountains
  • Frontier and pioneer life

2 About Elizabeth Gilbert

Born 1969

Elizabeth Gilbert (born July 18, 1969) is an American journalist and author. Her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, has sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. The book was also made into a film of the same name in 2010.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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