Edward Abbey
He was a hero to environmentalists and the
patron saint of monkeywrenchers, a man in love with desert solitude. A supposed
misogynist, ornery and contentious, he nevertheless counted women among his
closest friends and admirers. He attracted a cult following, but he was often
uncomfortable with it. He was a writer who wandered far from Home without really
starting out there.
Introductions
"When Edward Abbey died in 1989 at the age of sixty-two, the American
West lost one of its most eloquent and passionate advocates. Through his novels,
essays, letters and speeches, Edward Abbey consistently voiced the belief that
the West was in danger of being developed to death, and that the only solution
lay in the preservation of wilderness. Abbey authored twenty-one books in his
lifetime, including Desert
Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench
Gang, The Brave
Cowboy, and The Fool's
Progress. His comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang helped inspire a
whole generation of environmental activism. A writer in the mold of Twain and
Thoreau, Abbey was a larger-than-life figure as big as the West itself."
--
cover text from the Edward Abbey
Video
Meet Edward Paul Abbey, twentieth-century polemicist and desert anarchist, a
character of elaborate contradictions and eccentricities whose words either
infuriated or delighted his readers.
In a career spanning four decades, he wrote passionately in defense of the
Southwest and its inhabitants, often mocking the mindless bureaucratic forces
hell-bent on destroying it. "Resist much, obey little," from Walt Withman, was
this warrior's motto.
While he was alive, attempts to label him in conventional terms nearly always
fell short because he was neither left-wing nor right-wing, nor was he an
outlaw. Abbey was a genuine rebel who simply did not believe in the moderns
industrial way of life. He wrote against the grain, always choosing the path of
the greatest resistance. Beginning in the 1950s, he depicted the Southwest not
as a virgin utopia peopled by rugged individualists, but as a region under siege
because of government and corporate greed, its people at risk of being cut off
from the primary wellspring of their spiritual strength - the wild places. He's
been dead for a while now, but the legend keeps in growing.
-- from Epitaph for a Desert
Anarchist
Edward Abbey became known as an "environmental writer". This title was not of
his choosing, nor to his liking. He preferred not to categorize his style at
all, but rather to "let his prose do his talking for him."
Placing a label on Edward Abbey's style would be akin to picking up all the
grains of sand in the desert South-west, putting them in a large glass
container, and labeling that container "Desert". What Ed wrote about was the
Earth, and his deep love of it. Whether he was writing about two snakes engaging
in a mating ritual in Utah, or about a slow train ride across the Australian
desert to Alice Springs, the Earth itself functions as the medium, and not
something made up or manufactured by the author. To begin to understand Abbey,
you must first take his advice to heart:
"Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon
country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these
pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got
to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and
knees, over the sandstone and through the...cactus. When traces of blood begin
to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."
Kent Duryee
"Edward Abbey is one of our foremost Western essayist and novelists. A
militant conservationist, he has attracted a large following -- not only within
the ranks of Sierra Club enthusiasts and dedicated backpackers, but also among
armchair appreciators of good writing. What always made his work doubly
interesting is the sense of a true maverick spirit at large, within it -- a kind
of spirit not imitable, limited only to the highest class of literary outlaws"
-- The Denver Post
"FAMOUS STAR EDWARD ABBEY
Edward Abbey is a writer. He writes about how to
blowup dams. The name of one of the books he wrote was called Monkey wrench
gang. He wears a black hat with a wrench on it. Ed has a gray elephant beard and
he's a tall, skinny man. Ed does not like the highway so he throws beer bottles
out the window. Ed does not like t.v. so the took his t.v. outside and took his
gun and shot his t.v. and now it's a sculpture in his backyard."
--
grade-school composition by Brady Barnes
Excerpts
For a taste of Edward Abbey's writing, please read this
excerpt from the chapter Terra Incognita: Into the Maze in his
book Desert
Solitaire.
"Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous,
leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the
clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys
tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark
primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and
mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and
pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient
unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk
across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon
the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of
wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you --- beyond that next turning of
the canyon walls."
Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey quote
All forms of government are pernicious,
including good government.
~
Why do I write? I write to entertain my
friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to
truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
~
I come
more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is
the only thing left that is worth saving.
~
I do not believe in personal
immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live
forever.
~
The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval
with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually
takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it
out of them.
http://www.abbeyweb.net/bio/index.html
