The Man Who Quit Money will be published by Riverhead/Penguin in March, 2012.
“This is a beautiful, thoughtful and wonderful book. I suspect I may find myself thinking about it every day for the rest of my life.”
-Eilzabeth Gilbert
“Maybe it’s just this odd, precarious moment we live in, but Daniel Suelo’s story seems to offer some broader clues for all of us. Mark Sundeen’s account will raise subversive and interesting questions in any open mind”
-Bill McKibben
“Mark Sundeen’s astonishing and unsettling book goes directly to the largest questions about how we live and what we have lost in a culture obsessed with money. Sundeen tells the story of a gentle and generous man who sought the good life by deciding to live without it. What’s most unsettling and astonishing is that he appears to have succeeded.”
- William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple : How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country
A Walden for the 21st Century
In the autumn of 2000, Daniel Suelo deposited his life savings—all thirty dollars of it – in a phone booth. He has lived without money ever since. And he has never felt so free, or so much at peace. “My wealth never leaves me,” he says. “Worrying about what could or should happen is a worse illness than what could or should happen.”
In The Man Who Quit Money, author Mark Sundeen tells the amazing story 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, and accepts what is freely given him. He no longer even carries an I.D. Yet he manages to fulfill amply 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.
Sundeen retraces the surprising path and guiding philosophy that led Suelo, step by step, from an idealistic childhood through youthful disillusionment to his radical reinvention of “the good life.” The Man Who Quit Money makes us question the decisions we all make — by default or by design — about how we live. And it inspires us to imagine how we might live better.