My Side of the Mountain

My Side of the Mountain is a 1959 adventure novel written and illustrated by American author Jean Craighead George. It follows a boy who sets out to live alone in the Catskill Mountains after leaving his family's New York City apartment. The book earned a Newbery Honor in 1960 and was loosely adapted as a film of the same name in 1969, with two sequels following it.

Sam Gribley's reasons are given in plain domestic terms: the family lives in a cramped apartment with eight siblings, and he decides to leave. He goes to his great-grandfather's abandoned farm near Delhi, New York, and the novel begins with him already established in a treehouse home in the forest during a severe blizzard, sharing it with a peregrine falcon named Frightful and a weasel called The Baron, and then recounts how he got there.

The book's practical detail is the point. Survival is treated as a matter of skill and knowledge, with foraging, shelter, tools and the training of a hunting bird described closely, and the animal companions are part of the household rather than decoration.