Alicia Bay Laurel is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

, author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, and musician

Musician

A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....

. Laurel is best known for her 1970 book "Living On The Earth", a notable guide for participants in the American back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Laurel grew up exposed to the arts, intellectual ideas and political activism. Her mother, Verna Lebow, was a sculptor and her father, Paul Kaufman, was a doctor. She briefly attended the Otis Art Institute

Otis College of Art and Design

Otis College of Art and Design is an art and design college in Los Angeles, California.The school's programs, accredited by WASC and National Association of Schools of Art and Design, include four-year BFA degrees in illustration, fine arts, graphic design, architecture, landscape design, interior...

, San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...

, and San Francisco Fashion Institute before seeking her own course driven by these influences. She studied music as well, and learned open-tuned guitar improvisation from John Fahey

John Fahey (musician)

John Fahey was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who pioneered the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been greatly influential and has been described as the foundation of American Primitivism, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the...

, who at the time was married to her cousin Janet Lebow.

Laurel lived on Wheeler Ranch near Occidental, California

Occidental, California

Occidental is a census-designated place in Sonoma County, California, United States. The population was 1,115 at the 2010 census, down from 1,272 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Occidental is located at...

, in Sonoma County in the early 1970s, where she wrote her book, Living on the Earth. Designed to be a guide for others at the commune, the book was first published by The Bookworks in Berkeley, California

Berkeley, California

Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

, in 1970 and sold out the first printing. It was picked up by Random House in 1971 and sold more than 350,000 copies. It appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list

New York Times Best Seller list

The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...

.

Moving to Maui

Maui

The island of Maui is the second-largest of the Hawaiian Islands at and is the 17th largest island in the United States. Maui is part of the state of Hawaii and is the largest of Maui County's four islands, bigger than Lānai, Kahoolawe, and Molokai. In 2010, Maui had a population of 144,444,...

in 1974, she had many professions, including photographer, teacher, musician and businesswoman. She updated Living on the Earth in 2000, travelled around the U.S., and returned to Hawaii.

Laurel still makes art and music, and is currently working on several book projects.