My Side of the Mountain is a middle-grade adventure novel written and illustrated by American writer Jean Craighead George published by E. P. Dutton in 1959.

[1] It features a boy who learns courage, independence, and the need for companionship while attempting to live in the Catskill Mountains of New York State.

In 1960, it was one of three Newbery Medal Honor Books (runners-up)[2] and in 1969 it was loosely adapted as a film of the same name.

Sam Gribley is a 12-year-old boy who intensely dislikes living in his parents' cramped New York City apartment with his eight brothers and sisters.

When a poacher illegally kills a deer, Sam steals the carcass, smokes the meat, and tans the hides.

Sam notices a raccoon digging for mussels in the creek and learns how to hunt for shellfish.

He steals two more dead deer from local hunters to make more clothes, and begins rapidly storing as many fruits and nuts as he can.

In the spring, Matt Spell, a local teenager who wants to be a reporter, arrives at Sam's treehouse home.

A short time later, Tom Sidler visits the farm and Sam realizes he is desperate for human companionship.

[3] The New York Times in 1959 gave the novel a solid review, calling it "a delightful flight from civilization, written with real feeling for the woods.

[6] Librarians and authors Janice DeLong and Rachel Schwedt listed the book as one of a "core collection for small libraries" of the contemporary fiction section.

[7] Author Charles Wohlforth, writing in 2004, agreed that it was a classic of contemporary children's literature.

[8] By 1998, the book had been translated into numerous foreign languages, and visitors to the Cannon Free Library in Delhi, New York, often asked to see the abandoned farm where the novel was set.

In 1999, reviewer Mary Harris Russell noted that "the narrator, Sam, speaks with a tone more measured than that of most teenagers.

[13] In 2012 it was ranked number 77 among all-time children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal.

The three novels were issued in an omnibus edition that retains the original pagination, about 600 pages in sum: My Side of the Mountain Trilogy (2000).