Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

An admissions counselor quickly assured Brand that Reed’s student body was no “odder” than those attending Oberlin, Swarthmore, Haverford (to name a few colleges with programs similar to Reed’s), or “your own eastern private colleges and universities.”

At Exeter, he would read Sweet Thursday and Cannery Row, John Steinbeck’s lightly fictionalized accounts of marine biologist Ed Ricketts.

As the train came through the Sierra Nevada, he was transfixed by the forests and mountains that stretched off into the distance in every direction. On the final day of the journey, the train made its way out of the mountains and through the Feather River Canyon, leaving him with a deep desire to return and explore the countryside.

The school was legendary for its skeptical academic mantra, “Go to primary sources,” an outlook that was repeatedly conveyed to Brand through the maternal side of his family.

Stewart Brand has described his mystic experience on the roof in various publications. The most complete account is in Michael Katz et al., eds., Earth’s Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 184–88.

It was like a Nick Adams boyhood taken from the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection In Our Time. Indeed, Brand’s childhood was in many ways parallel to Hemingway’s. Several decades earlier Hemingway had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago and summered at Windemere Cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, less than a two hours’ dr

It was a worldview that both resonated and broke with the New Left, for Brand rejected traditional politics and focused instead on what he called direct power—a focus on tools and skills for the individual—emerging from his early libertarian sympathies.

Steve Jobs fastened onto the Brand approach in recounting his own life in his influential 2005 Stanford commencement address. He found inspiration in the closing page of Brand’s Whole Earth Epilog. It captured the sensibility that emerged on the western edge of the continent during the sixties. The back cover of the 1974 edition of the publication

People who met him then described him as socially awkward, overly earnest, and cerebral.