TWENTY ACRES

A Seventies Childhood in the Woods

A memoir from the University of Arkansas Press. Order now from UAP, Bookshop.org, Broadway Books, Powell’s, or wherever books are sold!

Sarah Neidhardt was an infant when her parents joined the growing back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. Uprooting their young family to move from Colorado Springs to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, they built a cabin, grew their own food, and for years strove to escape their former lives and achieve an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency.

In Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods, bohemian counterculture meets pioneer homemaking. Neidhardt revisits her childhood with compassion and candor, drawing upon a trove of family letters to retrace her parents’ journey from their affluent youths, to their embrace of rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society. As she comes to better understand her family and the movement that shaped them, Neidhardt reveals both the treasures and tolls of an unconventional, pastoral life.

Audiobook available now!

Listen to interviews with Sarah.

I read Twenty Acres in bed at night…. and am (almost literally!) wearing my eyes out, often not putting the book down until the early hours. It’s so beautifully written, so evocative. I read on and on, wanting more, but not wanting it to finish.

—Shirley Collins, iconic English folk singer

2023 best memoir by a Portland author. Dotted with delightful photos and memorable anecdotes, Twenty Acres is a captivating look at one family’s journey into an “off-the-grid” lifestyle and their jarring return to conventional society.

—Michelle Kicherer, Willamette Week

Good stories are to be cherished and shared. They also help us understand ourselves and our communities. Sarah Neidhardt has written such a story in Twenty Acres. … [H]er story is remarkable in the way she weaves her rich sources together to paint a picture of one family enduring the hardships of living in the Ozarks in the 1970s. I highly recommend this book.

—Thomas M. Kersen, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, September 2024

Twenty Acres is a sensitive, thoughtful, honest book full of details that give this period in the author’s life solidity. . . . Her book is a gift that shows how her “back to the land” experience unfolded and what was gained or lost as a result. . . . The writing is clear, shorn of cliches and her voice is kind, showing compassion over judgment.

—Louise Halsey, Fort Smith Historical Society Journal, October 2023

A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry.

—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature, “15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Summer“

Weaving together extraordinary primary documents, research, and memory with gorgeously rendered prose, Neidhardt captures the zeitgeist of the back-to-the-land movement in the story of her family’s years in the Ozarks. Equal parts memoir and ethnography, Twenty Acres is lush, haunting, and ultimately elegiac, leaving us to consider the grand and often flawed ambitions of our histories, and how through those we come to know ourselves.

—Megan Kruse, author of Call Me Home

Twenty Acres is an engaging, thoughtful memoir of growing up in an off-the-grid cabin as part of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. Sarah Neidhardt captures her subject beautifully and offers a compelling portrait of a highly specific, historically significant time and place.

—Kate Daloz, author of We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

At turns poetic, shocking, terrifying, and nostalgic—and always riveting and real as dirt—Sarah Neidhardt’s meticulously researched memoir gives voice to a generation of back-to-the-landers’ children and to this hidden history of American family life.

—Ariel Gore, author of The Wayward Writer: Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar

Twenty Acres is authentic, clear, and evocative . . . a superb book.

—David Orr, author of Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward