Helen K. Nearing, who with her husband, Scott Nearing, wrote about leaving the congested streets of Manhattan to find peace and happiness through hard work and self-sufficiency on a New England farm, died on Sunday in an automobile accident near her home in Harborside, Me. She was 91.
Mrs. Nearing, whose husband died at 100 in 1983, had continued to live alone in the farmhouse they built 40 years ago overlooking Penobscot Bay. She was killed when a car she was driving struck a tree, said Eliot Coleman, a friend who lives on a neighboring farm.
Between them, Mrs. Nearing and her husband wrote more than 50 books during their half-century of homesteading, including "Living the Good Life" and "Continuing the Good Life," written initially in pamphlet form and then published by Schocken in 1954 and 1970, respectively. Although written shortly after the Depression, both books became primers for thousands of urbanites who dropped out of the corporate world in the early 1970's and headed for the quiet countryside.
Followers describe the Nearings as the "senior gurus" of the back-to-the-land movement.
"Materialism does not produce happiness," Mrs. Nearing told those who came to tour her Forest Farm and marvel that, in an age of mass communications, she still made do without radio or television.
"She gave in and had a telephone installed about 10 years ago so she could keep in touch with all her friends around the world," said Mr. Coleman, who with his wife, Barbara Damrosch, is host of a cable television series called "Natural Gardening."
A lifelong vegetarian, Mrs. Nearing also did not take aspirin or use a credit card. Instead, she helped to restore the soil of her farm, build a stone farmhouse and outbuildings and plant an organic garden. In her pantry, she filled barrels with flour and sugar, much like New England dwellers a hundred or more years before her.
"In November, the rafters in our big country kitchen are hung with braids of onions and shallots, with ears of dried corn, with drying herbs (mint, tarragon, thyme, parsley, celery, sage and lovage)," she once wrote in a letter to The New York Times.
"Of bottled canned goods in the kitchen cellar, we have 160 quarts of vegatable soup and tomato juice, 132 quarts of rose hips, 80 quarts of applesauce, 146 quarts of raspberries, and jars and jars of jam," she wrote.
Mrs. Nearing drew a parallel between the people who immigrated to New England in the 1700's and "the many young people of today who find no satisfactory way to exercise or develop their talents and interests in modern city or suburb."
"They are willing and eager to clear their land, build their homes, dig and cultivate their own gardens and subsist on their own work," she said. "They are finding out that it is possible to live daily self-sufficient lives even in the middle of the 20th century."
Believing in the adage "waste not, want not,"낭비하지않으면 부족함이 없다. she wrote about all her experiences, providing New Age homesteaders with 10- and 20-year projects leading toward "the good life."
"The Maple Sugar Book," which she wrote with her husband and which was published by Schocken in 1950, told not only of the art and history of sugaring but also of the practical details of sugar making.
Another primer, "Building and Using Our Sun-Heated Greenhouse," published in 1971 by Dutton and now out of print, told of how to grow vegetables year-round in New England without artificial heating.
Among the books that Mrs. Nearing wrote alone were "Wise Words on the Good Life" (Schocken, 1983) and "Simple Food for the Good Life" (Stillpoint, 1983), which she described as "an anti-cooking book that advocates fresh raw foods and minimal cooking."
Her latest work, to be published this month by Tilbury House, "Light on Aging and Dying," is a collection of quotations inspired by the death of her husband 12 years ago.
Mrs. Nearing, who was born in Ridgewood, N.J., graduated from Ridgewood High School, then traveled extensively aboard, studying the violin, which she gave up for gardening when she married Mr. Nearing.
The Nearings began their long journey in search of the good life in 1932, when Mr. Nearing, a professor of economics, left the academic world and moved far away from New York City and the Depression to the wilderness of Vermont, where they built their first farm.
Twenty years later, feeling crowded by a nearby ski lift and growing tourism, they headed for Maine.
They kept a car and a pickup truck but permitted no machines on the farm that were not run by human or animal power.
According to the Nearings' wishes, an education and retreat center is to be established on Forest Farm after their deaths. The nonprofit center, to be called the Good Life Center, is to be administered and financed in part by the Trust for Public Land of Boston, an organization that preserves rural sites and crafts.
The Social Science Institute, formed in 1953 to print political and economic pamphlets written by Mr. Nearing, will become part of the Good Life Center.
Mrs. Nearing is survived by a sister, Alice Vaughan of Dorset, Vt.; a niece, Barbara Tuttle, and a nephew, C. B. Vaughan, both of Dorset, and a stepson, Robert Nearing of Troy, Pa.
A memorial service will be held at 2 P.M. on Sunday, Oct. 1, at the Brookville Community Center in South Brookville, Me.