Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey (29 January 1927 – 14 March 1989) was an American essayist, novelist, and environmental provocateur whose writing about the desert Southwest — fiercely polemical, lyrically precise, deliberately outrageous, and animated by a genuine love of wildness — made him the most important literary voice of the American environmental movement and the spiritual godfather of radical ecology. His memoir Desert Solitaire (1968) is to environmentalism what Walden is to transcendentalism: the founding text, the book that established a vocabulary and an attitude. His novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) — about a band of misfits who sabotage the machinery of industrial development in the Southwest — inspired the founding of Earth First! and a tradition of environmental direct action that continues to the present.

Life and Career

Abbey was born on a farm in Home, Pennsylvania (Appalachia), hitched and rode freight trains across the country at seventeen, and fell permanently in love with the desert Southwest. He served in the Army in Italy during World War II, attended the University of New Mexico (BA and MA in philosophy), and worked for years as a seasonal ranger and fire lookout for the National Park Service — most importantly at Arches National Monument in Utah, the experience that became Desert Solitaire.

His early novels — Jonathan Troy (1954, which he later disowned), The Brave Cowboy (1956, filmed as Lonely Are the Brave with Kirk Douglas in 1962), and Fire on the Mountain (1962) — are works of Western regionalism: spare, morally serious novels about individuals resisting institutional power. The Brave Cowboy — about a cowboy who cuts through a barbed-wire fence and rides his horse into a modern city to break a friend out of jail — is the best of them and the one that established Abbey’s lifelong theme: the conflict between the free individual and the industrial-bureaucratic state.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968) — based on two seasons Abbey spent as a ranger at Arches in 1956 and 1957 — is his masterpiece of nonfiction. The book is part nature writing (descriptions of the desert landscape, its flora, fauna, geology, and weather), part philosophical meditation (on solitude, freedom, the meaning of wilderness), and part polemic (against the tourist industry, the road-builders, the dam-builders, and the entire apparatus of what Abbey called “industrial tourism”). Its voice — cantankerous, funny, deliberately provocative, and capable of passages of astonishing beauty — created a template for a generation of environmental writers.

The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) — about Doc Sarvis, Bonnie Abbzug, Seldom Seen Smith, and George Washington Hayduke, who travel the Southwest destroying billboards, disabling bulldozers, and plotting to blow up Glen Canyon Dam — is his most influential novel. The book is a picaresque comedy, a revenge fantasy, and a manual for ecological sabotage that Dave Foreman and other founders of Earth First! took as both inspiration and instruction. (Foreman titled his own manual Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.) Abbey always insisted the novel was fiction, not advocacy — a distinction his followers did not always observe.

The Fool’s Progress (1988) — a semi-autobiographical picaresque novel about a failed writer driving from Tucson to Appalachia — is his most personal novel. His essay collections — The Journey Home (1977), Abbey’s Road (1979), Down the River (1982), Beyond the Wall (1984), One Life at a Time, Please (1988) — are as important as his books and contain some of his finest writing.

Controversy

Abbey courted controversy. His views on immigration (he opposed it, on environmental grounds), on feminism (dismissive), and on the tactics of environmental activism (he celebrated sabotage) made him offensive to many on both the left and the right. He was a self-described anarchist who voted Republican, a nature lover who littered, and a defender of wilderness who drove a pickup truck through it. The contradictions were deliberate: Abbey distrusted consistency and believed that provocation was a moral obligation.

Critical Standing

Abbey’s literary reputation has grown since his death. Desert Solitaire is now regarded as one of the essential American nature books, alongside Walden, A Sand County Almanac, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. His influence on subsequent environmental writers — Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, Doug Peacock — is acknowledged.

He was buried, as he requested, in a sleeping bag in an unmarked desert grave. His friends drank whiskey, fired guns, and played music.

Key Works

• The Brave Cowboy (1956)
• Desert Solitaire (1968)
• The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)
• The Fool’s Progress (1988)

Collecting Abbey

Jonathan Troy (1954, Dodd Mead) — his disowned debut — is rare and brings $200–$600. The Brave Cowboy (1956, Dodd Mead) brings $100–$300. Desert Solitaire (1968, McGraw-Hill) in first edition with dust jacket brings $300–$1,000. The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975, Lippincott) brings $100–$300. Abbey signed at readings; signed copies are available.