Christopher McCandless
Best known from Jon Krakauer's book "Into the Wild," and the Sean Penn-directed movie of the same name,
Christopher McCandless (who renamed himself "Alexander Supertramp") was an American itinerant who dreamed of an Alaskan Odyssey in which he would live off the land, far from civilization. Though he was well-educated, his upper-middle class background and academic success only fueled his contempt for what he saw as the empty materialism of society. Tragically, after living out his adventure for 113 days in the Alaskan wilderness, McCandless succumbed to starvation in late August 1992.
Timothy Treadwell
Tim Treadwell was an environmentalist, amateur naturalist, eco-warrior and documentary
filmmaker who lived among the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park in
Alaska.
Despite living among the bears without any protection for 13 summers in a row,
by the end of the last summer his luck had finally run out as he and his girlfriend,
Amie Huguenard,
were killed and eaten by a bear. Though some found his idealism naive,
Treadwell fought to protect the habitat he loved through his activism and filmmaking.
His story was immortalized in the documentary film "
Grizzly Man."
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Henry David ThoreauThoreau was a famous American author, naturalist, philosopher and development
critic best known for his book "Walden," in which he reflected upon a period of
isolation spent living independently in a cabin beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
Although Thoreau returned to civilization after his time at Walden, his purpose
there was to isolate himself from society to gain a more objective understanding
of it. The work is recognized as a personal declaration of independence,
a voyage of spiritual discovery and manual for self reliance. Ted KaczynskiAlso known as the infamous Unabomber, Kaczynski is a primitivist who took
his criticisms of civilization and technology to the extreme. Although he had a
promising academic career, he eventually quit his professorship at the University
of California at Berkeley to live in a remote cabin without running water or
electricity in the wilds of Montana. There, Kaczynski began his bombing campaign,
sending 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people
and injuring 23. The rationale for his actions are outlined in his manifesto, titled
Industrial Society and Its Future. He is serving life without parole in a federal prison.
Noah John RondeauRondeau was a well-known hermit who evaded society in the high peaks of the
Adirondack Mountains in New York. Before retiring to his remote wilderness
home at the age of 46, Rondeau had said that he was "not well-satisfied with the
world and its trends." Although he remained mostly isolated, Rondeau would
occasionally accept visitors to his hermitage, and even performed the violin for
them. Unfortunately, he was forced to move from his home in the Adirondacks
and eventually died in 1967 while on welfare.
Paul GauguinPaul Gauguin was a leading Post-Impressionist artist, painter and writer known
for his primitivist style and philosophy. In 1891, frustrated by lack of recognition
at home and financially destitute, he decided to sail to the tropics to escape
European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional." He spent
his remaining years living in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, where he sided
with the natives and clashed with colonial forces. His works of that period are
full of exoticized views of the inhabitants of Polynesia. |
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