The Last American Man

Elizabeth Gilbert’s nonfiction book The Last American Man (2002) tells the story of Eustace Conway. Gilbert explores Conway’s unusual choice to live off the land and apart from modern, materialistic society. More than that, she uses his story to look at the larger picture of what it is to be a man in contemporary American society. Gilbert is a writer and journalist famous for works of fiction and nonfiction, including Eat, Pray, Love and The Signature of All Things.

Gilbert begins by introducing Conway as “the last American man.” She has known her subject a long time: they first met in 1993 through Conway’s younger brother, Judson. Already longtime friends with Judson Conway, she would become lifelong friends with Eustace Conway as well. Through her friendship, she offers particular insight into his character and personal history.

Conway, raised in Gastonia, North Carolina, brakes away from traditional society to make a life for himself surviving alone in the woods. By 2002, he has become a noted American naturalist and the founder of Turtle Island Preserve in North Carolina.



Why break with society? Gilbert offers clues. Conway’s home life was not a happy one during his childhood. His father, Big Eustace, was a chemical engineer who valued intellectualism and academic success above all else. Conway, then known as “Little Eustace,” was not the child his father dreamed of having. He did not apply himself at school and had no interest in pushing himself to achieve the highest marks. His father responded with cruelty and disdain, mocking his son and doling out disproportionate punishments.

Young Conway found solace from his father’s disapproval and disappointment in nature. He became a frequent visitor at the nearby Schiele Museum of Natural History. And whenever he wasn’t at school or in church, he could be found in the woods behind the Conway family home, exploring. By age twelve, he had begun to spend stretches of his life living off the land, alone in those woods. He displayed a preternatural ability to do so: Gilbert notes that by the age of seven, Conway “could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree.” By age seventeen, he officially moved out of his parents’ house to live in a teepee in the woods, using his survival skills and ingenuity to get by. He fashioned his own clothes from buckskin, snacked on nettles, and carved a set of wooden bowls and plates to eat off.

A few years later, he decided to live among a primitive tribe, the most technologically unadvanced people he could find. He flew to Guatemala to find fulfillment among a tribe that still practiced traditional ways of living and surviving. It was an important period in his life: he found some belonging among these people in a place so far removed from American consumerism. He accomplished a number of notable feats in his home country as well: he hiked the length of the Appalachian Trail on his own and paddled down the Mississippi in a handmade canoe.



Later, Conway actually did come back to civilization for a time: he attended college, partly to appease his father. Here, he achieved straight As and a double major in anthropology and English. Conway was popular among students, becoming a “big man on campus.” He was already something of a legend for his singular accomplishments and reputation as a wild man. After graduating, he returned to the wilderness.

Gilbert emphasizes that Conway is not a bleeding-heart tree hugger, nor a true survivalist: the wilderness is simply where he is comfortable, and where he feels he needs to be. She also notes another side to his character. Though Conway’s lifestyle is an expression of his dissatisfaction with the American Dream, he is still enmeshed in capitalism and the pursuit of money. He has bought land to set up a wilderness preserve, hoping someday to establish a utopian, off-the-grid community. But it takes money, work, and good business sense to make that happen. A former girlfriend describes Conway as someone “obsessed” with making money and buying land, someone who was always too busy traveling to spend time with her.

Conway establishes a wilderness preserve at Turtle Island. It offers a thousand acres of solitude and nature, and his hope is that he can use it to change the world. He uses his reputation to try to “wake up” complacent consumerist Americans. He sees his life as a challenge to unsustainable American lifestyles that hinge on the accumulation of wealth and comfort at the expense of the rest of the world. But he does so alone.



The Last American Man was a success upon publication. Reviews compared the book to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and praised Gilbert’s authorial voice as “wise and knowing,” delivering a stunning and balanced portrait of Conway’s life. The book received the National Book Award in 2002.