Payne Hollow Journal

Harlan Hubbard was Kentucky's Thoreau, and his journals are intimate records of a life lived in harmony with nature. For more than fifty years the artist, writer, and homesteader described daily activities and recorded keen observations as he sought to live simply and authentically. The third and climactic volume of his journals, Payne Hollow Journal, contains entries from the years he and his wife, Anna, lived at their Payne Hollow home along the Ohio River's Kentucky shore. There they mastered the arts of country life, building their own stone and timber house in 1952 and raising their own food. To live with nature was not a novel experience for the couple; earlier they had floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans on their homemade shantyboat. Hubbard described this journey in Shantyboat Journal, the basis for his Shantyboat and Shantyboat on the Bayous. By turns poetic and practical, Payne Hollow Journal celebrates nature's intense beauty and sometimes harsh realities as perhaps only an artist can see them. Here Hubbard reveals how dedication to work that provides sustenance—gardening, wood chopping, fishing, foraging, and raising goats-can also be fulfilling. Don Wallis's arrangement of the Payne Hollow entries reflects the seasonal changes in Hubbard and his life as well as in the natural world around him. At the beginning of this volume Hubbard writes, "When we are away from Payne Hollow, that place does not seem real or possible.... It is hard to explain our situation, to give reasons for our living this way to people who have no understanding or sympathy." A visit to the Hubbards' home through Payne Hollow Journal is ample explanation for anyone who has yearned to lead a life of simplicity and purpose.

Harlan Hubbard's PAYNE HOLLOW: LIFE ON THE FRINGE OF SOCIETY provides an account of a self-made alternative lifestyle in early 1950's America. Anna and Harlan Hubbard, refusing to adopt the industrial positioning provided, built a simple home at Payne Hollow and documented their "basic relationship of need to fulfillment within the carefully circumscribed wholeness of [their] honest, sensitive, extraordinary lives"--Edward Lueders. PAYNE HOLLOW creates its own self-referential world written as "a painter's prose" that fills its environment with a Thoreau-esque "ecstasy...expressed with sober simplicity"--The Louisville Courier-Journal.

Harlan and Anna Hubbard, newly married in middle age, build the boat of their dreams and drift down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Harlan is an artist and a writer with a poet's eye for the beauty of the world. Anna is a musician and an elegant master of the arts of graceful living. For seven years (1944-1951) the Hubbards make their home on their little boat, drifting with the river, camping on the land. Together they learn how to create and sustain a self-sufficient way of life that is infinitely fulfilling. It is a "river way of life" -- free-flowing, endowed with the love of nature, the discovery of community, the rewards of good work, and the joy of creativity. The journal is a witness to history, embracing the gentle spirit of an America now lost to modern "progress." It is one of the most significant renderings in our literature of a deeply felt sense of place. Out of this journal grew Harlan Hubbard's enduring classic, Shantyboat, and his idyllic Shantyboat on the Bayous. His later Payne Hollow is a Thoreauvian testament to the values embodied in the homesteading life the Hubbards lived for four decades after they completed their epic river journey. Their life together has been praised by Wendell Berry as "one of the finest accomplishments of our time." The Shantyboat Journal reveals its creation.

Anna Eikenhout (1902-1986) was an honors graduate of Ohio State University, a fine-arts librarian, a skilled pianist, and an avid reader in three languages. Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988), a little-known painter and would-be shantyboater, seemed an unlikely husband, but together they lived a life out of the pages of Thoreau's Walden. Much of what is known about the Hubbards comes from Harlan's books and journals. Concerning the seasons and the landscape, his writing was rapturous, yet he was emotionally reticent when discussing human affairs in general or Anna in particular. Yet it was through her efforts that their life on the river was truly civilized. Visitors to Payne Hollow recall Anna as a generous, gracious hostess, whose intelligence and artistry made the small house seem grander than a mansion.

Shantyboat is the story of a leisurely journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. For most people such a journey is the stuff that dreams are made of, but for Harlan and Anna Hubbard, it became a cherished reality. In their small river craft, the Hubbards became one with the flowing river and its changing weathers. This book mirrors a life that is simple and independent, strenuous at times, but joyous, with leisure for painting and music, for observation and contemplation.

By examining the life and work of celebrated painter, Harlan Hubbard, author Wendell Berry creates the perfect vehicle for emphasizing the themes of his other writings: the value of self-sufficiency, our responsibility to the environment, the holiness of everyday life, and the preference of simplicity over modern, mechanized life. Includes 20 color plates of Hubbard's own paintings, along with several photographs of Anna and Harlan Hubbard.

Harlan and Anna Hubbard, newly married in middle age, build the boat of their dreams and drift down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Harlan is an artist and a writer with a poet's eye for the beauty of the world. Anna is a musician and an elegant master of the arts of graceful living. For seven years (1944-1951) the Hubbards make their home on their little boat, drifting with the river, camping on the land. Together they learn how to create and sustain a self-sufficient way of life that is infinitely fulfilling. It is a "river way of life"—free-flowing, endowed with the love of nature, the discovery of community, the rewards of good work, and the joy of creativity. The journal is a witness to history, embracing the gentle spirit of an America now lost to modern "progress." It is one of the most significant renderings in our literature of a deeply felt sense of place. Out of this journal grew Harlan Hubbard's enduring classic, Shantyboat, and his idyllic Shantyboat on the Bayous. His later Payne Hollow is a Thoreauvian testament to the values embodied in the homesteading life the Hubbards lived for four decades after they completed their epic river journey. Their life together has been praised by Wendell Berry as "one of the finest accomplishments of our time." The Shantyboat Journal reveals its creation.