(#167861) TOTAL LOSS FARM: A YEAR IN THE LIFE. Raymond Mungo.

TOTAL LOSS FARM: A YEAR IN THE LIFE. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc. 1970. Octavo, Two-part cloth. First edition. Presentation copy with brief signed inscription by Mungo on front free endpaper. Mungo, with Marshall Bloom and Verandah Porche, founded the Liberation News Service in the late 1960s, a skyrocket of political protest journalism that didn't survive the transition to the 1970s after the founders all left to live on a commune in Massachusetts. But for a time he was at the center of hippie/underground culture in the late 1960s on the east coast. "Maybe you were there. In the very late 1960s, communes began to spring up — oh, the analogy is irresistible: like mushrooms — in New England. The farms, as they were known in the typically down-home vernacular of the day, were collectives of overeducated urban refugees, radical kids who’d reported the news or made the news, kids who were now worn out with the complications of the world. The farms were loosely bound in an extended community, but two were especially consanguineous. Montague Farm in western Massachusetts and Total Loss Farm in Vermont were started by the two founders of the Liberation News Service, a countercultural news agency that fed stories to papers large and small across the country. When L.N.S. fractured, its cofounders transplanted its values to the country. Raymond Mungo started Total Loss Farm, up in Vermont. A 20-minute drive to the south, Montague Farm was started by his L.N.S. compadre Marshall Bloom, a brilliant young Amherst radical. Mungo’s commune became the movement’s flagship when he published his 1970 memoir/group portrait/travel diary/whatever, “Total Loss Farm.” The book emerged as one of the foremost documents of the back-to-the-land project and later became a widely assigned text for college courses on the counterculture" (New York Times). A fine copy in very good dust jacket with light wear at edges and some dust soiling to white background. (#167861).

Price: $750.00

See more items by
Printing identification statement for this book:
First edition so stated on copyright page.