Abstract This article examines one of the most iconic spaces of the 1960 s American Counterculture, the commune, imagined by many as the ultimate escape from the Establishment: moving to a different space, creating an alternative community, and living in communion with the land. Focusing on T. C. Boyle’s Drop City (2003) and Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012), I analyze how literary representations of communal living negotiate the tension between idealism and material reality. I argue that in Boyle’s Drop City the commune’s collapse as a viable home stems from the community’s shortcomings, the individual and individualistic drives of its members, and the lack of respect for the spaces it occupies – the inability to turn a space into a place. In Groff’s Arcadia , I examine the commune’s potential as a space of freedom seen through a child’s eyes and later through an adult’s nostalgic memories, and its vulnerability as a precarious community at the mercy of the external world. Finally, I show how the urban space in the novel’s latter half serves not just as a contrast, but as a complementary space to the commune, revealing how the countercultural ideal adapts to new social and spatial realities. 1
Carmen M. Méndez García (Thu,) studied this question.