Description
The 50th anniversary edition of the best-selling memoir brings back Richard Proenneke’s world of the Alaskan wilderness and what it truly means to live hand in hand with nature as one’s only companion. In 1967, Richard Proenneke retreated to the untouched landscape of Twin Lakes to build a log cabin for himself and live alone in the wilderness for the next 30 years. From Richard’s journals with a personal friendship with the man himself, author Sam Keith penned the moving story of One Man’s Wilderness as a tribute to a man who carved his masterpiece out of the beyond.Richard Proenneke retired from his job as an operator and mechanic at age fifty to live the next thirty years of his life in the wilds of Twin Lakes, Alaska. There he built a cabin, hunted and gathered his own food, educated himself as a naturalist, and recorded his activities and findings in journals and on film. His time was later made into the 2003 PBS documentary Alone in the Wilderness and written in the book One Man’s Wilderness, published in 1973 by his friend Sam Keith. Proenneke returned to civilization in 1999 and died at the age of 82 in 2003 in Hemet, California.Sam Keith met Richard Proenneke in 1952 at the Kodiak Naval Base in Alaska, where the two became friends exploring the Kodiak and Afognak Islands together. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English, with aspirations to become a writer. His 1973 book One Man’s Wilderness bestseller and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. Keith died in 2003.
