Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness was published by McGraw-Hill, New York, in January 1968, in a first printing of approximately 5,000 copies priced at $5.95. The book was drawn from journals Abbey kept during the seasons of 1956 and 1957, when he worked as a ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) near Moab, Utah. It sold modestly on first publication but built a devoted readership through the 1970s and is now considered the most important work of American desert literature since John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Region (1878).
The Book
Abbey arrives at Arches with nothing — a trailer, a gas stove, some books. He has come to the desert “not to escape but to be at home” — to encounter the landscape unmediated by highways, visitor centres, and what he savagely calls “industrial tourism.” The book is structured as a series of essays, roughly following the arc of a season from spring to autumn, covering his explorations of the canyons, his encounters with wildlife (including a memorable rattlesnake that shares his camp), and his philosophical meditations on wilderness, civilisation, and the meaning of human life in the face of geological time.
The writing alternates between lyric description and combative polemic. Abbey’s descriptions of the desert — the red rock, the juniper, the silence, the stars — are among the finest passages of nature writing in American literature. His polemics against the National Park Service, the uranium industry, dam builders, and the automobile are incendiary and intentionally provocative. He argues that wilderness should be preserved not for human recreation but for its own sake — that the existence of inaccessible, uninhabited land is a necessary counterweight to civilisation.
The Polemic
Abbey is not a gentle environmentalist. He advocates closing the national parks to cars, removing roads, and requiring visitors to walk in. He attacks the Park Service for turning wilderness into theme parks. He suggests that the desert should be “defended” — a word he would later literalise in The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), whose characters sabotage bulldozers and bridges. Desert Solitaire provides the philosophical foundation for what would become the radical environmental movement, including Earth First! and the broader direct-action tradition.
His politics are deliberately contradictory: he is a libertarian who advocates government wilderness protection, an anarchist who worked for the federal government, a misanthrope who writes with deep compassion for the living world. These contradictions are the book’s energy source — Abbey is never comfortable, never complacent, and never boring.
Collecting Desert Solitaire
First edition (1968, McGraw-Hill): Approximately 5,000 copies, $5.95.
Identification points:
- McGraw-Hill imprint
- First printing stated
- Brown cloth binding
- Dust jacket with desert photograph
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $3,000–$10,000
- Near Fine/Very Good jacket: $1,500–$5,000
- Signed first edition: $5,000–$15,000+
- Without jacket: $200–$600
Value trajectory: Strong and sustained appreciation. Abbey’s death in 1989 (he was buried illegally in the desert by friends, as he requested) created a fixed supply of signed material. The book’s status as the foundational text of American environmental writing ensures permanent demand. Signed copies are particularly valuable — Abbey signed books at readings throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but supply is finite and collectors are passionate.
Abbey’s Legacy
Desert Solitaire created a genre: the combative, personally engaged, politically radical nature essay. Every subsequent American nature writer — Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Macfarlane — writes in the shadow of Abbey’s achievement. The book’s insistence that wilderness is not a recreational resource but a moral necessity remains radical, and its anger at the destruction of the American landscape has only become more justified with time.