Driftwood

Jessica K. Whitehead has done more than brick-and-mortar work to reconstruct the forces and personalities that shaped the life of a unique Kentuckian. She has done much more, tracing the quest of Kentucky's Thoreau for a life lived close to the bone in the natural world, a life that combines simple living with genuine creativity. The book becomes a reflection on the restlessness of the American spirit and asks what it means to pursue individual happiness free of the mania of owning things and the amassing of wealth that too single-mindedly has answered for the American dream. In a feat of research and revelation that avoids hagiography, Whitehead has made this icon fully human, examining the mythos of a legendary Kentuckian to reveal the essential Hubbard, a man we would have to invent if he had not existed.

~Richard Taylor, former Kentucky Poet Laureate and author of Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape

An epic story of our conflictive American nature and the many currents that finally deposited into place one of our most authentic artists and writers.

~Morris A. Grubbs, editor of Conversations with Wendell Berry

Place Harlan Hubbard in the line of American rebel mystics—from Everett Ruess to Scott and Helen Nearing to Daniel Suelo—who marched away from the casino economy toward a life woven with nature's risks and ecstasies. Driftwood gives him the rich and wise consideration he has long deserved.

~Mark Sundeen, author of Delusions and Grandeur and The Unsettlers

Whitehead's Driftwood is a vantage point from which we may survey not only the life of Hubbard, its component circumstance, coincidence, and experience, but also the topography of symbol and meaning that Hubbard explored. The hills, hollers, creeks, and rivers of our Bluegrass are revived and sustained by Hubbard's work and Whitehead's telling of it. Hubbard is hierophant of the wild and growing world, exemplifying quiet stewardship, gentle cooperation, and an ability to express the movement of the animate wilderness while communicating our place within it. Whitehead has traced the long shadow cast by Hubbard so that we may walk in the shade with understanding, surefooted and clear-eyed in the edenic garden that is our state.

~Zack Poehlein, co-author of Kentucky Deceased and the zine Derby City Midnight