The Man Who Quit Money

Mark Sundeen is an award-winning writer whose nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and The Believer. He is the author of Car Camping (HarperCollins, 2000) and The Making of Toro (Simon & Schuster, 2003), and co-author of North by Northwestern (St. Martin's, 2010), which was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has taught fiction and nonfiction in the MFA programs at the University of New Mexico and Western Connecticut State University. He lives in Montana and Utah.

Grand Prize Winner of the 2015 Green Book Festival Mark Sundeen's new book, The Unsettlers, is coming in January 2017 from Riverhead BooksIn 2000, Daniel Suelo left his life savings-all thirty dollars of it-in a phone booth. He has lived without money-and with a newfound sense of freedom and security-ever since. The Man Who Quit Money is an account of how one man learned to live, sanely and happily, without earning, receiving, or spending a single cent. Suelo doesn't pay taxes, or accept food stamps or welfare. He lives in caves in the Utah canyonlands, forages wild foods and gourmet discards. He no longer even carries an I.D. Yet he manages to amply fulfill not only the basic human needs-for shelter, food, and warmth-but, to an enviable degree, the universal desires for companionship, purpose, and spiritual engagement. In retracing the surprising path and guiding philosophy that led Suelo into this way of life, Sundeen raises provocative and riveting questions about the decisions we all make, by default or by design, about how we live-and how we might live better.