'It is rough, tough, combative.passionately felt, deeply poetic.' But perhaps the spirit of the man, the work, and the circumstances of its writing were best summarized by Larry McMurtry in his review for the Washington Post: 'Edward Abbey is the Thoreau of the American West. 'Abbey is one of our very best writers about wilderness country,' observed Wallace Stegner in the Los Angeles Times Book Review 'he is also a gadfly with a stinger like a scorpion.' 'This book may well seem like a ride on a bucking bronco,' added Edwin Way Teale in the New York Times. I never wanted to be anything but a writer, period.' First published in 1968 to 'a few brief but not hostile notices,' Desert Solitaire quietly sold out of its first printing but eventually developed a loyal enough following in paperback to earn Abbey the 'nature writer' label he claims never to have wanted.ĭesert Solitaire lives on because it is a work that reflects profound love of nature and a bitter abhorrence of all that would desecrate it. 'But I did not mean to be mistaken for a nature writer. 'I confess to being a nature lover,' admits Abbey more than thirty years after his sojourn in the wilderness. Desert Solitaire is Edward Abbey’s 1968 memoir of his six months serving as a park ranger in Utah’s Arches National Park in the late 1950s.

In it he tells of his stint as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, of his love for the natural beauty that surrounded him, and of his distaste for the modernizing improvements designed to increase visitation to the park. In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Desert Solitaire, the University of Arizona Press is pleased to publish a new edition featuring a new introduction by the author, his definitive corrections to the text, and new illustrations commissioned exclusively for this volume.Įdward Abbey's account of two summers spent in southeastern Utah's canyonlands is surely one of the most enduring works of contemporary American nature writing. At last, one of the most popular books on the American West is available once again in hardcover. Edward Abbey was an outspoken wilderness advocate, and his nonfiction writing falls somewhere between Thoreau and Hunter Thompson.

Desert solitaire book