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2 Adventures in Contentment Some Back-to-the-Land Writers and Their Readers After Three Acres and Liberty, Bolton Hall wrote several more books, beginning with A Little Land and a Living (1908) and The Garden Yard (1909). Hall wrote about the single tax and about Tolstoy; he wrote advice books about sleep and about the grieving process. (His Halo of Grief was reportedly a favorite of a much later homesteader, Helen Nearing.)1 He even wrote a simplified version of the King James Bible. Hall was not particularly interested in making a profit from his books. In fact, he was so eager to get his messages out that in 1914 he put a notice in the Survey (the journal of record for social workers) offering to lend his books to anyone who wanted them. With the exception of Three Acres and Liberty, published by Macmillan, Hall brought out his back-to-the-land books under his own imprint, Arcadia Press, which he apparently financed himself. Hall did not depend on book sales for his living, but he was still in some sense a professional author: he wanted his books widely read, and he expended a good deal of effort distributing them. Macmillan had not been his first choice as publisher for Three Acres and Liberty. Hall submitted the manuscript first to the ambitious new publishing house of Doubleday and Page, already well known for its interest in the backto -the-land question. In an uncharacteristic failure of vision, that press rejected his manuscript. An editor praised the book: “It is a good idea and well carried out—that we admit.” The problem was that he thought the back-to-the-land fad was already over: “The same sort of thing has too often been written up before.” Still, the editor was not sure: “We may prove to be wrong—for your 52 sake we hope so.”2 His doubt turned out to be well founded, and his own publishing house helped prove him wrong. Although Doubleday, Page turned down Bolton Hall, it published many back-to-the-land titles, beginning in the first year of its existence with J. P. Mowbray’s A Journey to Nature (1901). The press brought out back-to-the-land stories penned by several of its established fiction writers, including Walter Prichard Eaton’s Idyl of Twin Fires (1915), Grace Richmond’s Strawberry Acres (1911), and Thomas Dixon’s The Life Worth Living (1905). (Dixon was the author of the infamous The Leopard’s Spots and The Klansman, books that helped to romanticize the restoration of white supremacy in the South at the turn of the century.) From its founding, Doubleday had a significant stake in back-to-the-land publishing. In 1900, after dissolving his partnership with S. S. McClure, Frank Doubleday formed a partnership with Walter Hines Page, former editor of Atlantic Monthly. Doubleday kept a firm hand on the book trade; Page took charge of the periodicals. Their interest in back-to-the-land material was evident on both sides of the house. In the first five years of the new century, the press launched three (or, depending on how they are counted, four) magazines, a gesture of reckless ambition that fueled rumors that Rockefeller was funding the company. All the magazines had back-to-the-land features. Country Life in America was a glossy, heavily illustrated magazine that offered advice about rural life to people with the means to gratify their whims. The Garden Magazine, along with a short-lived effort called Farming which soon merged with it, was devoted to more practical advice about growing things.3 Most significant was Page’s own mouthpiece, the World’s Work, a hard-core progressive magazine specializing in the analysis of complex social problems. Even in its first year of publication in 1901, its pages were already filled with articles like “Going Back to the Soil” and “Can I Make a Farm Pay?” In 1912, Page turned the attention of the World’s Work entirely to the problem of getting people back to the land, operating a clearinghouse for would-be farmers under the title “Does Anybody Want a Farm?”4 In fact, Doubleday identified itself with the back-to-the-land movement in the most concrete way possible. In 1910 the press moved its offices and printing plant out of Manhattan to a brand new facility on forty acres in rural Garden City, Long Island, making such a huge impact there...

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