The Last American Man

Description

At the age of twenty-two, Elizabeth Gilbert was doing everything she could to avoid a nine-to-five job. She worked on ranches in Wyoming, rode horses pretending to be a cowgirl, and fell for the smooth-talking cowboys who were the last vestige of the American frontier that she longed for. And then she met Eustace Conway. Eustace Conway is like no other man. At the age of seventeen, he ditched the comforts of suburbia to escape to the mountains where he lived alone in a teepee. Twenty years on, he is still there. Everything he needs he builds, grows or kills. Over the years, he has stopped at nothing in pursuit of bigger, bolder challenges: he travelled the Mississippi in a handmade wooden canoe; he walked the two-thousand-mile Appalachian Trail; he hiked across the German Alps in trainers. Dazzled by his tales of daring and adventure, Elizabeth Gilbert set off on her own adventure to discover the last American man. Written with her trademark warmth and humour that made Eat, Pray, Love an international bestseller, The Last American Man is an unforgettable story of an irrepressible life lived to the extreme. First published 2002.

Promotion info

Eat, Pray, Love has sold five million copies in the US and over 35,000 copies in the UK (BookScan). For fans of the films Into The Wild and Grizzly Man, and the books The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux, The Call of the Wild by Jack London and All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. Gilbert's UK fans will love this previously unpublished book as well as the new paperback editions of Gilbert's fiction, Pilgrims and Stern Men, that Bloomsbury will publish in March.

Reviews

'It is almost impossible not to fall under the spell of Eustace Conway ... his accomplishments, his joy and vigor, seem almost miraculous' New York Times Review of Books 'Gilbert takes a bright-eyed bead on Eustace, hitting him square with a witty modernist appraisal of folkloric American masculinity' The Times 'Conversational, enthusiastic, funny and sharp, the energy of The Last American Man never ebbs' New Statesman 'A riveting, deftly written, biography' Irish Times

Author description

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of a short story collection, Pilgrims (a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award), a novel, Stern Men and a book of non fiction, The Last American Man (nominated for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book for 2002). She is a writer-at-large for American GQ where she has received two National Magazine Award nominations for feature writing. Her most recent book, Eat, Pray, Love is an international bestseller. Elizabeth Gilbert lives in Philadelphia.