The Last American Man

Elizabeth Gilbert could have written her hero-worshipping biography of The Last American Man because she was enamored with and possibly loved Eustace Conway and that she wanted to deliver a powerful message to attempt to save our nation from its own greed and sloth by living in harmony with nature. She uses the “man of destiny,” Eustace Conway, to show the possibility that an idealistic mountain man can convert us to a mindful natural way of living. In the Last American Man, Eustace is portrayed as an extraordinary man with very ordinary flaws. Eustace lives in an idealistic world that essentially shuts others out and has no tolerance for varying levels of competence or preferences that are different than his. However, since Elizabeth Gilbert is enamored by Eustace, she often represents him as a masculine hero who can bathe in icy streams and eat road kill. On pages fifty-eight and fifty-nine Gilbert states how she feels about Eustace by describing him as a teacher and soft spoken man and compares him to many other books and so-called “mountain men.” Gilbert states, “I am the Teacher of all the People, he seemed to say as he drifted out of his world and hovered over ours. I am trusted and I am to be followed but I am not to be frenched…And he does, after all, bathe in icy streams, so the whole libido problem is a little hard to picture. Still—and this is what got me—Eustace Conway presented himself as an epic American masculine hero.”