Soil test kits, rotary plows, wildflower seeds, beekeeper gloves, pig-tooth nippers, wind generators, gas masks, Arctic Boy water coolers, a Swedish composting toilet called Clivus—these were just a few of the tools one could find in the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture’s essential guide to living off the grid. First published in 1968, the Catalog mixed product reviews, repair manuals, holistic pamphlets and reading lists on everything from composting to cybernetics. Serving a fast-growing yet ultimately short-lived communitarian surge that sprang up in the late Sixties, the Catalog expanded in size and frequency until in 1971, at the height of its influence, the editors announced what they framed as its final installment: The Last Whole Earth Catalog. It sold two million copies and won the National Book Award in the new Contemporary Affairs category, and just as the dream of radical cooperative living was slipping out of reach.
Running along the lower right-hand corner of The Last Whole Earth Catalog was something unexpected: a serialized novel that unfolded segment by segment across its 450 pages. The novel was Divine Right’s Trip. Though inspired by the ethos of the counterculture movement, it also posed the essential question of what should follow in the wake of the communes. In retrospect, the novel reads as a hinge between two emerging visions of human connection: one drifting toward abstract, digital networks, and the other toward engagement with tangible, place-based community. Reissued this August from Gnomon Press, months before the passing of its author, Gurney Norman, in October, the novel’s animating question still feels like an urgent one: In an increasingly networked world, what would it mean to return home, and to forge a literature that was rooted in place?
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Gurney Norman spent his boyhood in the coal camps of Allais, in Hazard County, Kentucky. He came from a mining family: his paternal grandfather managed a commissary, and his maternal grandfather operated an independent pony mine after decades as an underground miner in Virginia. Norman remembered his father as a tragic figure, intelligent and literary, whose ambitions were derailed by the Depression. He worked underground in the same mine where his father held a white-collar job, enlisted near the end of World War II, and returned in poor health to find that his skill set had “vanished out of the economy.” Norman recalled his father taking solitary bus trips north—to Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland—in search of work as a “common laborer.” In his parents’ absence, he was raised by his grandparents in the Appalachian borderlands of eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia, who instilled in him a deep respect for education (“Fight your books!” his grandmother would say).
Qualifying through his father, Norman used the GI Bill to study journalism at the University of Kentucky. He wrote for regional and campus newspapers, covering, with deep personal investment, the United Mine Workers Strike of 1959. He found in these pages an outlet for his experiments in fiction as well. A tough mentor saw his potential and urged him to apply for Stanford’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing. “If you don’t do this,” Norman remembered him saying, “I don’t ever want anything more to do with you.” The challenge motivated him, and he won the fellowship and went to Stanford, where he studied with Frank O’Connor, whose class-conscious stories of rural Ireland, and formal innovations with the short-story cycle, would profoundly influence Divine Right’s Trip.
It was in a class taught by another literary giant, Malcolm Cowley, that Norman met Ken Kesey, whose charisma drew him into the Perry Lane scene in Menlo Park, a bohemian enclave that nurtured the Merry Pranksters and the emerging counterculture. Others recall Norman as a regular fixture at Perry Lane—a popular presence at parties, and liable to suggest some crazy game to play. One participant recalled an anarchic round of “human cat’s cradle,” with Norman shouting, “All the thumbs raise their hands!” Even during his two years of military service at Fort Ord, an army base in Monterey, he’d return on the weekends for what he called “beatnik life.”
Through his old Perry Lane friends—and a shared experience of military training—Norman met Stewart Brand, who was then publishing the Whole Earth Catalog. Knowing that Norman had worked as a journalist at a local paper in Kentucky after his time at Stanford, Brand took him on as an editor and book reviewer. Brand, who trained as a biologist, had spent a summer visiting communes across Colorado and New Mexico, studying what tools might help them realize their ideals. This research informed the first issue in 1968. The debut didn’t sell immediately, but it gained enough momentum for the small staff to plan a series. Over the next few years they produced six semi-annual editions of the catalog, along with a Supplement that offered readers a glimpse of the communal life. To purchase the items listed, readers could visit the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park (a photograph shows the editorial staff outside the shop— Brand leaning in the doorway; Norman theatrically thumbing through an issue). But the readership extended far beyond that local scene, and it wasn’t limited to the commune dwellers either; issues showed up in bookstores and suburban living rooms across the country. The popularity of the series owed much to Brand’s ability to link different communities: the art worlds of Manhattan, the emergent tech culture of Menlo Park and the rural experiments of the communes.
By 1970, however, the countercultural movement was beginning to show its limits. Most of the best-known communes were short lived, collapsing due to a lack of resources, internal conflict, manipulative leadership, epidemics or land disputes. From his vantage point in Menlo Park, Gurney Norman felt this disillusionment acutely. He recalled an increasingly depraved scene at Perry Lane. Although he had originally been interested in peyote for its ceremonial use among Indigenous groups, he saw that drug use had become severed from any sense of ritual. One time he and his girlfriend were secretly dosed with LSD at a party celebrating Ken Kesey’s release from prison. Norman grew increasingly frustrated with the movement’s nihilism and its general lack of interest in politics or civil rights, epitomized by the Pranksters’ ironic slogan, “A Vote for Barry is a Vote for Fun.” Against the broader backdrop of the Manson murders and the violence at the 1969 Altamont Free Concert, these experiences convinced Norman that the counterculture had begun to show its “dark underside.”
No single explanation can capture a movement as sprawling as the communitarian surge of the late Sixties, but a few broad motives stand out: opposition to the Vietnam War, a wish to escape a technocratic society, general mistrust of government, and the promise of autonomy through new information systems. But even as the communal experiment began to lose momentum, these impulses persisted, leaving editors of the Whole Earth Catalog to consider where the energy might go next. Stewart Brand increasingly looked to the emerging tech culture of Menlo Park, where new media and information tools seemed to promise easier connections across distance; the Catalog’s growing emphasis on books, data and systems theory already reflected this shift.
As Brand would write in the so-called Last Whole Earth Catalog: “We encourage others to initiate similar services, to fill the vacuum in the economy we stumbled into and are stepping out of.” Those who heeded the call, as the following decades would prove, were in the tech world, where entrepreneurs—including Steve Jobs, the founder of Stripe and some early Facebook employees—read it as an early map of digital possibilities. Computer scientist Alan Kay later described the Catalog a print prototype of the internet, and Divine Right’s Trip as an example of its brilliant user interface: a narrative thread that exposed readers to new information. But Norman’s novel traced out a route that turned away from Brand’s cybernetic frontiers.
As Norman later recalled, Brand visited him one afternoon in the backyard of his Menlo Park home. After two years of publication, Brand had decided to “kill” the Whole Earth Catalog and was looking for an idea for its final issue. Norman floated an idea: the Catalog ought to include a novel. Though at this point he’d mostly written journalism, he had left journalism in the first place in order to focus more on his fiction, and had drafted some still-unpublished stories during a summer as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains. Brand accepted, and they settled on a plan: the narrative would appear in tiny segments scattered throughout its pages, drawing on whatever products were listed in the same spread: if a Coleman stove appeared in an ad, the protagonist might use one for cooking. For this final issue, Norman accepted a $300 monthly stipend and holed up in his writing studio above a former fish-and-chips shop in downtown Palo Alto.
A novel driven entirely by product placement: it could’ve been an amusingly hollow exercise, but it turned into something more ambitious. Norman quickly shed the constraints of the original plan, instead setting out to write a poetic odyssey of the counterculture generation. The novel’s hero, Divine Right (D.R.) Davenport, is a drifting hippie whose road trip across America becomes an allegory for the changing fortunes of the counterculture itself. Along the way, he encounters the figures who defined and distorted the era’s ideals: the fringe naturopath (and proto-heath influencer), the gun-toting outdoorsman, the manipulative guru. Gradually, he sees that most attempts to escape hierarchy only reproduce new, more perverse forms of it. In the end he abandons this utopian fantasy and seeks redemption in his coal-scarred natal hills of Kentucky. The message to Whole Earth readers was a fairly direct one: rather than build an entirely new world, they should face up to the demands of the old one.
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Divine Right’s Trip opens somewhere in the nebulous West. At the wheel of a battered VW bus sits Divine Right Davenport, the novel’s feckless hero. His long-suffering girlfriend, Estelle, rides beside him. The narration obliquely informs us that the couple attended the Altamont Free Concert, which might account for their manic exhaustion. They’re supposed to reach St. Louis within a few days, but they keep drifting off course, mostly due to D.R.’s slavish devotion to coincidence: he looks for signs in the landscape, listens for synchronicities or tosses coins for the I Ching. Even his name comes by chance when the words “Divine Right” appear to him in a stoned session of cloud-gazing. In an early segment, D.R. is overcome with dread when he spots a “freakish-looking” hitchhiker on the horizon. He sighs: “I wish I didn’t have to pick him up.”
D.R. is shaped by the era’s faith in information systems; he lets probability dictate his movements, and he embodies all the dangers of limitless openness. He passively absorbs sound bites from talk radio, repeating whatever he’s heard most recently, whether it’s about the Turner Thesis, the genocide of the Native Americans or the definition of the word “balance.” As Estelle puts it, he’s at the mercy of “wisdom pushers.” When hitchhikers have nothing to teach him, their silence irritates him, and he drops them like dead weight.
When the couple arrives at a campsite called Eagle Rock, D.R. encounters the first in a series of mentor-adversaries: the Lone Outdoorsman, a figure who at first appears to be a paragon of self-reliance. Modeling himself after his pioneer forebears, he carries a canteen, a compass, a hunting knife, numerous survival kits and some bars of pemmican, and he “banged and rattled like a mobile hardware store.” But he soon reveals a menacing impulse: he stalks the “hippie queer” D.R. and Estelle, watches them make love on a rock, and imagines punishing them for their “filthy crime.” He plans an “amphibious assault” that would make use of an inflatable life raft (conveniently listed in the Whole Earth Catalog), as well as his own pistol to finish off the job. Then he has a sudden and inexplicable change of heart: “I guess when it comes to being with people and judging ’em,” he reasons, “I’m what you’d call a liberal.” He decides that instead of riddling their bodies with bullets, he’ll invite them to his camper for steak and TV. D.R., oblivious to the danger, accepts this deranged hospitality with the same uncritical openness that defines the rest of his journey.
They may have dodged a grisly fate at Eagle Rock, but D.R. still lets chance run his life. Along the highway, he happens to see an adulterated neon church sign that reads, “Dope is the Only Answer.” He interprets this as a command to drop an ego-dissolving three hundred micrograms of acid. For the next twenty or so pages he’s rendered nonverbal; as he struggles to come out of it, his mind flips between hazy mantras and paranoid ramblings, leaving the all-too-patient Estelle to take the helm.
Through Estelle’s eyes, D.R.’s main flaw comes into focus. He makes mentors of everyone he meets, and in that way he becomes an ideal authoritarian subject. This is especially evident when they encounter a man who calls himself “the Greek,” lingering ominously around a rest stop in sandals and a toga. Though he has the makings of a successful health influencer in the modern day, in the world of DRT he is relegated to haunting rest stops and hitching rides. He lectures D.R. on meditation, the mucus-free diet, the FDA (“subjecting the world to a mucus-loving servitude”), the cleansing power of death and the wisdom of ancient Sumerians (“All they ate were walnuts, and they only fucked once a year”). D.R., his brain made pliable from psychedelics, absorbs every word. The segment culminates in a scene that is no less grotesque for its literalness: the Greek probes D.R.’s throat with his fingers, helping him find the proper vibration of the sacred primordial Om. By this point Estelle is seething. Through her we can see that D.R. is a dangerously passive man: “When he was right, when he was clear and cool and up and unhassled, D.R.’s mind was as beautiful to see in operation as anybody’s … [but] he was so willing to devalue what was already in his own head and credit fast-talking assholes with some sort of superior wisdom.” They manage to reach St. Louis, and Cincinnati after that, but they’re drifting further and further apart; eventually they get into one final, banal argument over the phone, and when D.R. returns their rendezvous point, Estelle is gone.
Without Estelle, the novel loses some of the critical force that makes its early segments so compelling. She is DRT’s secular, rationalizing presence; through her we can distinguish pseudo-philosophies and esoteric mysticism from true enlightenment. But the novel also insists that D.R. must arrive at this discernment on his own in order to realize a masculine ideal of self-reliance. In “On Heroes,” one of Norman’s essay contributions to the Last Whole Earth Catalog, he urges readers to cut themselves loose from the “Mother Country” of middle-class consumer culture and become clear-thinking “Long Hunters,” modeled on the figure of Daniel Boone. The essay mirrors the sort of neo-traditional gender roles that shaped many of the communes, but in DRT it is Estelle who already embodies that pragmatic intelligence. D.R., wholly dependent on her, can’t understand this yet. He has to lose her before he can experience an epiphany of his own.
What follows in Estelle’s absence is a sobering and penitent reversal of the first half’s aimless drift. D.R. gets a phone call, his first moment of true accountability. Although at first he insists it’s a call from God, he’s really speaking to Mrs. Godsey, the owner of his hometown’s general store. She informs him that his Uncle Emmit is ill, and a sense of duty propels him eastward; as he heads toward Kentucky, shaking off the superstitious residue of his former self, we get something like On the Road in reverse, where the hero scrambles to reconstitute his dissolved ego, muttering resentments about Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, and pledging himself instead to the homeplace.
In contrast to the techno-optimism of Menlo Park and Stewart Brand’s circle, Norman’s final chapters turn toward a distinctly anti-modernist vision, no doubt influenced by activist, fellow Kentuckian and Norman’s longtime friend, Wendell Berry. When D.R.’s bus breaks down again, he accepts help from a stranger who guides him through roads ruined by strip mining back to his homeplace of Trace Fork. Norman’s style shifts here from mystical to sharply observational: he describes the stripped ridges, the yellow creeks, the mounds of refuse (across Norman’s body of work we learn various names for these, including slag heaps and culm piles), the heavy sulphuric smell in the air. Through the voice of the stranger, referred to only as the Miner, we hear a bitter skepticism toward hollow federal programs that promised renewal while maintaining dependency; he hopes, semi-sarcastically, to join what he calls the “Happy Pappys,” a welfare scheme for fathers with children. These passages suggest that Norman had developed some sympathy for Berry’s distrust of collective assistance, and could see the argument for private solutions. The realism of this section then yields to the mythical. The Miner reveals that his true name is Virgil, casting the journey home as a descent into the underworld, a sort of katabasis by carbide lamp.
When D.R. finally reaches Trace Fork, a mood of belated atonement sets in. He steps into a caretaker role for his Uncle Emmit, whose condition has worsened and who has barely enough strength to curse D.R. for hauling him to the hospital. After that initial flare of resentment, the two arrive at a strained but tender reconciliation. D.R. helps Emmit through the most intimate tasks: he monitors his hydration, steadying him on his slow trips back and forth to urinate (“fill him up and pour him out”); he volunteers to give him a shave so that the orderlies can rest. He spends several nights tending to his uncle alongside the neighbor Leonard and the orderly Mrs. Hubbard. On the eve of Emmit’s death, a network of feeling forms between the caretakers and the place itself: “D.R. drank two cups of Mrs. Hubbard’s coffee, and then later went outside and sipped the whisky Leonard left him, and as he looked up at the stars, and smelled the coal dust in the air and listened to the trains clanging across the river in the yards, he thought about how kind all the people were.” Overwhelmed with emotion, D.R. experiences the world as a system of interconnected organisms—only now his vision is emotionally earned rather than chemically induced.
After Emmit’s death, D.R. apprentices himself to Leonard, the neighbor, who sets him to work on a new hog pen. Here D.R. learns the value of sustained commitment: hammering nails, splitting rocks with a sledgehammer, making meaningful contact with the earth. But he still retains traces of the counterculture’s network thinking. Through D.R.’s eyes, the hog pen appears to have all the necessary components of a cybernetic system, with Leonard playing the role of controller, the fence regulating the flow of the inputs and outputs. D.R. “drove the nails unerringly,” “ran the one-by-sixes across the front,” “closed the fence,” “cut a door in the barnwall,” all for the purpose of “setting limits on the space.” What we have here is a swine circuit, with the hogs giving feedback: squealing, pissing, “smell[ing] out their new universe.” Once this project is complete, D.R. wants to take on a new one, using business principles reminiscent of the counterculture’s “enlightened economics.” He dreams about finishing a plan of his Uncle Emmit’s: building a network of worm pits and rabbit hutches and using the rabbit droppings as fertilizer for the exhausted topsoil. He thinks he might start a “far out” company called Magic Rabbit Inc., writing to friends in disparate places and offering them positions.
From this place of newly forged confidence, D.R. reaches out to Estelle. Whether he has grown up is hard to say; we never hear what he tells her on the phone to win her back. Yet she arrives suddenly in Kentucky, and the two of them are married. Their wedding gathers together D.R.’s two worlds. Compared to the vivid characters drawn in the early segments, the attendees read like sketchy caricatures: on one side are the hippie freaks who document the event with every available gadget; on the other, the Bible-toting, R.C. Cola-drinking locals (one wonders about the absence of Mamaw and Papaw). Their fusion brings about a jam session that one attendee dubs, inauspiciously, “Hillbilly Hindu Rock.” The Estelle we met earlier might’ve seen this hasty reunion as just another pseudo-philosophy, a nostalgic return-to-tradition fantasy. But here she’s strangely silent, like Eurydice after Orpheus leads her out of the underworld.
When John Updike reviewed the novel for the New Yorker in 1972, he called its second half “a stout celebration of the clan, of native soil and hard work and pastoral goodness,” and wondered whether “the sated and disgusted offspring of middle-class America” could ever do more than “condescend” to rural life. It seems to me that Updike’s question was one that Norman was asking himself at the very moment he was writing the book. Fortunately, the success of DRT yielded many opportunities to return home: invited for readings and workshops across the region, he began spending more time in Kentucky, finally settling there for good in 1979. What followed was a far deeper engagement. Norman dedicated himself to regional writing and filmmaking, mentored generations of students and helped build networks that sustained a number of important literary journals. He also collaborated with Kentucky Educational Television, writing and narrating a trio of documentaries about the state’s history and landscape: Time on the River (1987), From This Valley (1989) and Wilderness Road (1991). In these works, Norman’s navigation of the natural world serves as a material continuation of D.R.’s journey of self-discovery.
Looking back at the countercultural spirit that produced Divine Right’s Trip, two divergent visions of human connection came into focus. One imagined a future built on dematerialized networks, forms made possible by cybernetics. Had Norman chosen that route, he may have spent his energy exploring the benefits of life-extending blood transfusions, or building a clock that tolls every ten thousand years. He managed instead to maintain the counterculture’s collaborative spirit and networking impulse without severing himself from place and ecology. After returning home, Norman joined the English faculty at the University of Kentucky, where over nearly fifty years he became a beloved teacher and mentor. Since his passing in October, countless local writers have remembered him as a generous listener, a sage-like mentor who could help them escape literary conventions and find a voice of their own, and a gifted storyteller with an infinite supply of tales of growing up in eastern Kentucky.
I hadn’t heard the author’s name until last summer, when I met an academic from Berea College who had traveled up to New York for a mutual friend’s wedding. Knowing what I know now about his philosophy, I’m not surprised that while he remains obscure nationally, he inspires a deep local reverence. In 2023, the University of Kentucky hosted “Gurney Fest,” a celebration of his work complete with buttons and pins featuring his likeness; that same year saw the completion of a new affordable-housing development called “Gurney’s Bend.” I wasn’t wholly persuaded by Divine Right Davenport’s reconciliation of two competing impulses—the dream to create a completely new community and the wish to repair the old one—but it seems clear that Norman achieved something like this synthesis in his own life over the decades. It calls to mind a moment in Time on the River, where the camera follows Norman as he drives a Chevrolet Blazer across a shallow stretch of the Kentucky River, and his voice describes a fascination with points of confluence: “To come to know the order and coherence of a natural system is more than an esoteric exercise; to know the lay of the land and the courses of flowing water is to have the beginnings of personal coherence in one’s own mind.”
Photo credit: Briarpatch
Soil test kits, rotary plows, wildflower seeds, beekeeper gloves, pig-tooth nippers, wind generators, gas masks, Arctic Boy water coolers, a Swedish composting toilet called Clivus—these were just a few of the tools one could find in the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture’s essential guide to living off the grid. First published in 1968, the Catalog mixed product reviews, repair manuals, holistic pamphlets and reading lists on everything from composting to cybernetics. Serving a fast-growing yet ultimately short-lived communitarian surge that sprang up in the late Sixties, the Catalog expanded in size and frequency until in 1971, at the height of its influence, the editors announced what they framed as its final installment: The Last Whole Earth Catalog. It sold two million copies and won the National Book Award in the new Contemporary Affairs category, and just as the dream of radical cooperative living was slipping out of reach.
Running along the lower right-hand corner of The Last Whole Earth Catalog was something unexpected: a serialized novel that unfolded segment by segment across its 450 pages. The novel was Divine Right’s Trip. Though inspired by the ethos of the counterculture movement, it also posed the essential question of what should follow in the wake of the communes. In retrospect, the novel reads as a hinge between two emerging visions of human connection: one drifting toward abstract, digital networks, and the other toward engagement with tangible, place-based community. Reissued this August from Gnomon Press, months before the passing of its author, Gurney Norman, in October, the novel’s animating question still feels like an urgent one: In an increasingly networked world, what would it mean to return home, and to forge a literature that was rooted in place?
●
Gurney Norman spent his boyhood in the coal camps of Allais, in Hazard County, Kentucky. He came from a mining family: his paternal grandfather managed a commissary, and his maternal grandfather operated an independent pony mine after decades as an underground miner in Virginia. Norman remembered his father as a tragic figure, intelligent and literary, whose ambitions were derailed by the Depression. He worked underground in the same mine where his father held a white-collar job, enlisted near the end of World War II, and returned in poor health to find that his skill set had “vanished out of the economy.” Norman recalled his father taking solitary bus trips north—to Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland—in search of work as a “common laborer.” In his parents’ absence, he was raised by his grandparents in the Appalachian borderlands of eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia, who instilled in him a deep respect for education (“Fight your books!” his grandmother would say).
Qualifying through his father, Norman used the GI Bill to study journalism at the University of Kentucky. He wrote for regional and campus newspapers, covering, with deep personal investment, the United Mine Workers Strike of 1959. He found in these pages an outlet for his experiments in fiction as well. A tough mentor saw his potential and urged him to apply for Stanford’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing. “If you don’t do this,” Norman remembered him saying, “I don’t ever want anything more to do with you.” The challenge motivated him, and he won the fellowship and went to Stanford, where he studied with Frank O’Connor, whose class-conscious stories of rural Ireland, and formal innovations with the short-story cycle, would profoundly influence Divine Right’s Trip.
It was in a class taught by another literary giant, Malcolm Cowley, that Norman met Ken Kesey, whose charisma drew him into the Perry Lane scene in Menlo Park, a bohemian enclave that nurtured the Merry Pranksters and the emerging counterculture. Others recall Norman as a regular fixture at Perry Lane—a popular presence at parties, and liable to suggest some crazy game to play. One participant recalled an anarchic round of “human cat’s cradle,” with Norman shouting, “All the thumbs raise their hands!” Even during his two years of military service at Fort Ord, an army base in Monterey, he’d return on the weekends for what he called “beatnik life.”
Through his old Perry Lane friends—and a shared experience of military training—Norman met Stewart Brand, who was then publishing the Whole Earth Catalog. Knowing that Norman had worked as a journalist at a local paper in Kentucky after his time at Stanford, Brand took him on as an editor and book reviewer. Brand, who trained as a biologist, had spent a summer visiting communes across Colorado and New Mexico, studying what tools might help them realize their ideals. This research informed the first issue in 1968. The debut didn’t sell immediately, but it gained enough momentum for the small staff to plan a series. Over the next few years they produced six semi-annual editions of the catalog, along with a Supplement that offered readers a glimpse of the communal life. To purchase the items listed, readers could visit the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park (a photograph shows the editorial staff outside the shop— Brand leaning in the doorway; Norman theatrically thumbing through an issue). But the readership extended far beyond that local scene, and it wasn’t limited to the commune dwellers either; issues showed up in bookstores and suburban living rooms across the country. The popularity of the series owed much to Brand’s ability to link different communities: the art worlds of Manhattan, the emergent tech culture of Menlo Park and the rural experiments of the communes.
By 1970, however, the countercultural movement was beginning to show its limits. Most of the best-known communes were short lived, collapsing due to a lack of resources, internal conflict, manipulative leadership, epidemics or land disputes. From his vantage point in Menlo Park, Gurney Norman felt this disillusionment acutely. He recalled an increasingly depraved scene at Perry Lane. Although he had originally been interested in peyote for its ceremonial use among Indigenous groups, he saw that drug use had become severed from any sense of ritual. One time he and his girlfriend were secretly dosed with LSD at a party celebrating Ken Kesey’s release from prison. Norman grew increasingly frustrated with the movement’s nihilism and its general lack of interest in politics or civil rights, epitomized by the Pranksters’ ironic slogan, “A Vote for Barry is a Vote for Fun.” Against the broader backdrop of the Manson murders and the violence at the 1969 Altamont Free Concert, these experiences convinced Norman that the counterculture had begun to show its “dark underside.”
No single explanation can capture a movement as sprawling as the communitarian surge of the late Sixties, but a few broad motives stand out: opposition to the Vietnam War, a wish to escape a technocratic society, general mistrust of government, and the promise of autonomy through new information systems. But even as the communal experiment began to lose momentum, these impulses persisted, leaving editors of the Whole Earth Catalog to consider where the energy might go next. Stewart Brand increasingly looked to the emerging tech culture of Menlo Park, where new media and information tools seemed to promise easier connections across distance; the Catalog’s growing emphasis on books, data and systems theory already reflected this shift.
As Brand would write in the so-called Last Whole Earth Catalog: “We encourage others to initiate similar services, to fill the vacuum in the economy we stumbled into and are stepping out of.” Those who heeded the call, as the following decades would prove, were in the tech world, where entrepreneurs—including Steve Jobs, the founder of Stripe and some early Facebook employees—read it as an early map of digital possibilities. Computer scientist Alan Kay later described the Catalog a print prototype of the internet, and Divine Right’s Trip as an example of its brilliant user interface: a narrative thread that exposed readers to new information. But Norman’s novel traced out a route that turned away from Brand’s cybernetic frontiers.
As Norman later recalled, Brand visited him one afternoon in the backyard of his Menlo Park home. After two years of publication, Brand had decided to “kill” the Whole Earth Catalog and was looking for an idea for its final issue. Norman floated an idea: the Catalog ought to include a novel. Though at this point he’d mostly written journalism, he had left journalism in the first place in order to focus more on his fiction, and had drafted some still-unpublished stories during a summer as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains. Brand accepted, and they settled on a plan: the narrative would appear in tiny segments scattered throughout its pages, drawing on whatever products were listed in the same spread: if a Coleman stove appeared in an ad, the protagonist might use one for cooking. For this final issue, Norman accepted a $300 monthly stipend and holed up in his writing studio above a former fish-and-chips shop in downtown Palo Alto.
A novel driven entirely by product placement: it could’ve been an amusingly hollow exercise, but it turned into something more ambitious. Norman quickly shed the constraints of the original plan, instead setting out to write a poetic odyssey of the counterculture generation. The novel’s hero, Divine Right (D.R.) Davenport, is a drifting hippie whose road trip across America becomes an allegory for the changing fortunes of the counterculture itself. Along the way, he encounters the figures who defined and distorted the era’s ideals: the fringe naturopath (and proto-heath influencer), the gun-toting outdoorsman, the manipulative guru. Gradually, he sees that most attempts to escape hierarchy only reproduce new, more perverse forms of it. In the end he abandons this utopian fantasy and seeks redemption in his coal-scarred natal hills of Kentucky. The message to Whole Earth readers was a fairly direct one: rather than build an entirely new world, they should face up to the demands of the old one.
●
Divine Right’s Trip opens somewhere in the nebulous West. At the wheel of a battered VW bus sits Divine Right Davenport, the novel’s feckless hero. His long-suffering girlfriend, Estelle, rides beside him. The narration obliquely informs us that the couple attended the Altamont Free Concert, which might account for their manic exhaustion. They’re supposed to reach St. Louis within a few days, but they keep drifting off course, mostly due to D.R.’s slavish devotion to coincidence: he looks for signs in the landscape, listens for synchronicities or tosses coins for the I Ching. Even his name comes by chance when the words “Divine Right” appear to him in a stoned session of cloud-gazing. In an early segment, D.R. is overcome with dread when he spots a “freakish-looking” hitchhiker on the horizon. He sighs: “I wish I didn’t have to pick him up.”
D.R. is shaped by the era’s faith in information systems; he lets probability dictate his movements, and he embodies all the dangers of limitless openness. He passively absorbs sound bites from talk radio, repeating whatever he’s heard most recently, whether it’s about the Turner Thesis, the genocide of the Native Americans or the definition of the word “balance.” As Estelle puts it, he’s at the mercy of “wisdom pushers.” When hitchhikers have nothing to teach him, their silence irritates him, and he drops them like dead weight.
When the couple arrives at a campsite called Eagle Rock, D.R. encounters the first in a series of mentor-adversaries: the Lone Outdoorsman, a figure who at first appears to be a paragon of self-reliance. Modeling himself after his pioneer forebears, he carries a canteen, a compass, a hunting knife, numerous survival kits and some bars of pemmican, and he “banged and rattled like a mobile hardware store.” But he soon reveals a menacing impulse: he stalks the “hippie queer” D.R. and Estelle, watches them make love on a rock, and imagines punishing them for their “filthy crime.” He plans an “amphibious assault” that would make use of an inflatable life raft (conveniently listed in the Whole Earth Catalog), as well as his own pistol to finish off the job. Then he has a sudden and inexplicable change of heart: “I guess when it comes to being with people and judging ’em,” he reasons, “I’m what you’d call a liberal.” He decides that instead of riddling their bodies with bullets, he’ll invite them to his camper for steak and TV. D.R., oblivious to the danger, accepts this deranged hospitality with the same uncritical openness that defines the rest of his journey.
They may have dodged a grisly fate at Eagle Rock, but D.R. still lets chance run his life. Along the highway, he happens to see an adulterated neon church sign that reads, “Dope is the Only Answer.” He interprets this as a command to drop an ego-dissolving three hundred micrograms of acid. For the next twenty or so pages he’s rendered nonverbal; as he struggles to come out of it, his mind flips between hazy mantras and paranoid ramblings, leaving the all-too-patient Estelle to take the helm.
Through Estelle’s eyes, D.R.’s main flaw comes into focus. He makes mentors of everyone he meets, and in that way he becomes an ideal authoritarian subject. This is especially evident when they encounter a man who calls himself “the Greek,” lingering ominously around a rest stop in sandals and a toga. Though he has the makings of a successful health influencer in the modern day, in the world of DRT he is relegated to haunting rest stops and hitching rides. He lectures D.R. on meditation, the mucus-free diet, the FDA (“subjecting the world to a mucus-loving servitude”), the cleansing power of death and the wisdom of ancient Sumerians (“All they ate were walnuts, and they only fucked once a year”). D.R., his brain made pliable from psychedelics, absorbs every word. The segment culminates in a scene that is no less grotesque for its literalness: the Greek probes D.R.’s throat with his fingers, helping him find the proper vibration of the sacred primordial Om. By this point Estelle is seething. Through her we can see that D.R. is a dangerously passive man: “When he was right, when he was clear and cool and up and unhassled, D.R.’s mind was as beautiful to see in operation as anybody’s … [but] he was so willing to devalue what was already in his own head and credit fast-talking assholes with some sort of superior wisdom.” They manage to reach St. Louis, and Cincinnati after that, but they’re drifting further and further apart; eventually they get into one final, banal argument over the phone, and when D.R. returns their rendezvous point, Estelle is gone.
Without Estelle, the novel loses some of the critical force that makes its early segments so compelling. She is DRT’s secular, rationalizing presence; through her we can distinguish pseudo-philosophies and esoteric mysticism from true enlightenment. But the novel also insists that D.R. must arrive at this discernment on his own in order to realize a masculine ideal of self-reliance. In “On Heroes,” one of Norman’s essay contributions to the Last Whole Earth Catalog, he urges readers to cut themselves loose from the “Mother Country” of middle-class consumer culture and become clear-thinking “Long Hunters,” modeled on the figure of Daniel Boone. The essay mirrors the sort of neo-traditional gender roles that shaped many of the communes, but in DRT it is Estelle who already embodies that pragmatic intelligence. D.R., wholly dependent on her, can’t understand this yet. He has to lose her before he can experience an epiphany of his own.
What follows in Estelle’s absence is a sobering and penitent reversal of the first half’s aimless drift. D.R. gets a phone call, his first moment of true accountability. Although at first he insists it’s a call from God, he’s really speaking to Mrs. Godsey, the owner of his hometown’s general store. She informs him that his Uncle Emmit is ill, and a sense of duty propels him eastward; as he heads toward Kentucky, shaking off the superstitious residue of his former self, we get something like On the Road in reverse, where the hero scrambles to reconstitute his dissolved ego, muttering resentments about Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, and pledging himself instead to the homeplace.
In contrast to the techno-optimism of Menlo Park and Stewart Brand’s circle, Norman’s final chapters turn toward a distinctly anti-modernist vision, no doubt influenced by activist, fellow Kentuckian and Norman’s longtime friend, Wendell Berry. When D.R.’s bus breaks down again, he accepts help from a stranger who guides him through roads ruined by strip mining back to his homeplace of Trace Fork. Norman’s style shifts here from mystical to sharply observational: he describes the stripped ridges, the yellow creeks, the mounds of refuse (across Norman’s body of work we learn various names for these, including slag heaps and culm piles), the heavy sulphuric smell in the air. Through the voice of the stranger, referred to only as the Miner, we hear a bitter skepticism toward hollow federal programs that promised renewal while maintaining dependency; he hopes, semi-sarcastically, to join what he calls the “Happy Pappys,” a welfare scheme for fathers with children. These passages suggest that Norman had developed some sympathy for Berry’s distrust of collective assistance, and could see the argument for private solutions. The realism of this section then yields to the mythical. The Miner reveals that his true name is Virgil, casting the journey home as a descent into the underworld, a sort of katabasis by carbide lamp.
When D.R. finally reaches Trace Fork, a mood of belated atonement sets in. He steps into a caretaker role for his Uncle Emmit, whose condition has worsened and who has barely enough strength to curse D.R. for hauling him to the hospital. After that initial flare of resentment, the two arrive at a strained but tender reconciliation. D.R. helps Emmit through the most intimate tasks: he monitors his hydration, steadying him on his slow trips back and forth to urinate (“fill him up and pour him out”); he volunteers to give him a shave so that the orderlies can rest. He spends several nights tending to his uncle alongside the neighbor Leonard and the orderly Mrs. Hubbard. On the eve of Emmit’s death, a network of feeling forms between the caretakers and the place itself: “D.R. drank two cups of Mrs. Hubbard’s coffee, and then later went outside and sipped the whisky Leonard left him, and as he looked up at the stars, and smelled the coal dust in the air and listened to the trains clanging across the river in the yards, he thought about how kind all the people were.” Overwhelmed with emotion, D.R. experiences the world as a system of interconnected organisms—only now his vision is emotionally earned rather than chemically induced.
After Emmit’s death, D.R. apprentices himself to Leonard, the neighbor, who sets him to work on a new hog pen. Here D.R. learns the value of sustained commitment: hammering nails, splitting rocks with a sledgehammer, making meaningful contact with the earth. But he still retains traces of the counterculture’s network thinking. Through D.R.’s eyes, the hog pen appears to have all the necessary components of a cybernetic system, with Leonard playing the role of controller, the fence regulating the flow of the inputs and outputs. D.R. “drove the nails unerringly,” “ran the one-by-sixes across the front,” “closed the fence,” “cut a door in the barnwall,” all for the purpose of “setting limits on the space.” What we have here is a swine circuit, with the hogs giving feedback: squealing, pissing, “smell[ing] out their new universe.” Once this project is complete, D.R. wants to take on a new one, using business principles reminiscent of the counterculture’s “enlightened economics.” He dreams about finishing a plan of his Uncle Emmit’s: building a network of worm pits and rabbit hutches and using the rabbit droppings as fertilizer for the exhausted topsoil. He thinks he might start a “far out” company called Magic Rabbit Inc., writing to friends in disparate places and offering them positions.
From this place of newly forged confidence, D.R. reaches out to Estelle. Whether he has grown up is hard to say; we never hear what he tells her on the phone to win her back. Yet she arrives suddenly in Kentucky, and the two of them are married. Their wedding gathers together D.R.’s two worlds. Compared to the vivid characters drawn in the early segments, the attendees read like sketchy caricatures: on one side are the hippie freaks who document the event with every available gadget; on the other, the Bible-toting, R.C. Cola-drinking locals (one wonders about the absence of Mamaw and Papaw). Their fusion brings about a jam session that one attendee dubs, inauspiciously, “Hillbilly Hindu Rock.” The Estelle we met earlier might’ve seen this hasty reunion as just another pseudo-philosophy, a nostalgic return-to-tradition fantasy. But here she’s strangely silent, like Eurydice after Orpheus leads her out of the underworld.
When John Updike reviewed the novel for the New Yorker in 1972, he called its second half “a stout celebration of the clan, of native soil and hard work and pastoral goodness,” and wondered whether “the sated and disgusted offspring of middle-class America” could ever do more than “condescend” to rural life. It seems to me that Updike’s question was one that Norman was asking himself at the very moment he was writing the book. Fortunately, the success of DRT yielded many opportunities to return home: invited for readings and workshops across the region, he began spending more time in Kentucky, finally settling there for good in 1979. What followed was a far deeper engagement. Norman dedicated himself to regional writing and filmmaking, mentored generations of students and helped build networks that sustained a number of important literary journals. He also collaborated with Kentucky Educational Television, writing and narrating a trio of documentaries about the state’s history and landscape: Time on the River (1987), From This Valley (1989) and Wilderness Road (1991). In these works, Norman’s navigation of the natural world serves as a material continuation of D.R.’s journey of self-discovery.
Looking back at the countercultural spirit that produced Divine Right’s Trip, two divergent visions of human connection came into focus. One imagined a future built on dematerialized networks, forms made possible by cybernetics. Had Norman chosen that route, he may have spent his energy exploring the benefits of life-extending blood transfusions, or building a clock that tolls every ten thousand years. He managed instead to maintain the counterculture’s collaborative spirit and networking impulse without severing himself from place and ecology. After returning home, Norman joined the English faculty at the University of Kentucky, where over nearly fifty years he became a beloved teacher and mentor. Since his passing in October, countless local writers have remembered him as a generous listener, a sage-like mentor who could help them escape literary conventions and find a voice of their own, and a gifted storyteller with an infinite supply of tales of growing up in eastern Kentucky.
I hadn’t heard the author’s name until last summer, when I met an academic from Berea College who had traveled up to New York for a mutual friend’s wedding. Knowing what I know now about his philosophy, I’m not surprised that while he remains obscure nationally, he inspires a deep local reverence. In 2023, the University of Kentucky hosted “Gurney Fest,” a celebration of his work complete with buttons and pins featuring his likeness; that same year saw the completion of a new affordable-housing development called “Gurney’s Bend.” I wasn’t wholly persuaded by Divine Right Davenport’s reconciliation of two competing impulses—the dream to create a completely new community and the wish to repair the old one—but it seems clear that Norman achieved something like this synthesis in his own life over the decades. It calls to mind a moment in Time on the River, where the camera follows Norman as he drives a Chevrolet Blazer across a shallow stretch of the Kentucky River, and his voice describes a fascination with points of confluence: “To come to know the order and coherence of a natural system is more than an esoteric exercise; to know the lay of the land and the courses of flowing water is to have the beginnings of personal coherence in one’s own mind.”
Photo credit: Briarpatch
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.