One day around the turn of the century (not this century, the last one,) Joseph Knowles stripped naked and lived for a month in the woods of Maine. Well, maybe. Probably not. It's widely agreed today that Knowles pulled off an enormous hoax. Afterwards, he slowly warmed up to being a public figure. As soon as the newspapers started calling him a fraud, Knowles staged a second trip to the woods, but this trip was moved to the background of the minds of the public because of the first World War. He tried several times after that to become famous again, and even proposed another trip, this time with a woman who was an actress to boot, but nothing worked. The rest of his life was spent in a driftwood cabin on the beach, making art.
Naked in the Woods does not only tell the story of Joseph Knowles. It also talks about everyone and everything related to him. It goes off on tangents in every chapter, but the tangents are fun to read and give a wonderful cultural picture of the era. It's clear throughout that Jim Motavelli worked hard to research for
Naked in the Woods, contacting everybody who would have known anything about Joseph Knowles or those close to him. Reading about him, I find it sad that Knowles is no longer well-known.
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