Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey was an author, died 1989.
Abbey wrote two books that ended up doing completely different jobs. Desert Solitaire, from 1968, is a season in the canyon country written against the paving of it, and it sits on the shelf beside Thoreau and Muir. The Monkey Wrench Gang, which is not among the credits listed here, is a comic novel about sabotaging bulldozers, and radical environmental groups have cited it as an inspiration ever since. One book made him a nature writer, the other made him a problem.
He was an essayist above all, an anarchist, and a critic of public land policy who was rude about the agencies in charge of it. The prose is why he lasted: plain declarative sentences about heat and rock, a sudden turn into argument, then a joke at the reader's expense. He is also, read now, difficult to defend on several fronts, and the honest way through him is with the argument running rather than switched off.
The credits here include his journals, in Confessions of a Barbarian, which is where the public performance drops away and the writer doing the performing becomes visible. There is also a high school literature anthology, a fate he would certainly have had something to say about.
Books (5)
Where to start with Edward Abbey
Begin with Desert solitaire, and do not let anyone talk you into the novels first. It is where the voice arrives whole: patient nature writing that keeps getting interrupted by a man losing his temper about tourism, and the interruptions are the point rather than a flaw.
Good News is the fiction, a post-collapse story set in his own desert, and it is thinner than the essays. Come to it once you already like him. Confessions of a barbarian is the journals, and useful precisely because it shows how deliberately the cranky public Abbey was assembled. Wild is an anthology appearance rather than a book of his, and Prentice Hall Literature--The American Experience is a schoolbook, which is its own quiet joke.
He is easier to disagree with in print than almost any American nature writer. Coming from me that is a compliment.
Edward Abbey on CrossBinge
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