Abbey’s Road

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“The natural world, as we call it, has already become remote, out of reach, mysterious, in the minds of urban and suburban Americans. They see the wilderness disappearing, slipping away, receding into an inaccessible past. But they are mistaken. That world can still be rescued… that is my main excuse for this book.”—Edward Abbey

You are about to visit some of the most exciting places on earth. Not the sort of excitement that makes morning headlines or the nightly news. Instead it is the excitement that comes from experiencing the natural world as it always has been and should be, and seeing human beings living in tune with its subtlest rhythms. In Australian cattle country and in the primitive outback. On a desert island off Mexico and in the Sierra Madres. On the Rio Grande and in the great Southwest. On Lake Powell in Utah and in the living American desert. It is adventure. It is enlightenment. It is vintage Abbey.

“I have been along a few of Mr. Abbey’s roads. He sees much more than I did. Indeed, reading him is often better than being there was.”—John Leonard, author of Reading for My LifeIntroduction: Confessions of a Literary Hobo

Travel
1. The Reef
2. Anna Creek
3. The Outback
4. Back of Beyond
5. A Desert Isle
6. Sierra Madre
7. On the River Again
8. A Walk in the Park
9. Down there in the Rocks

Polemics and Sermons
10. Science with a Human Face
11. The Right to Arms
12. The Conscience of the Conqueror
13. Merry Christmas, Pigs!
14. The Winnebago Tribe

Personal History
15. My Life as a P.I.G., or the True Adventures of Smokey the Cop
16. In Defense of the Redneck
17. Death Valley Junk
18. Fire Lookout
19. The Sorrows of Travel Coda: Cape Solitude

“Abbey’s unique prose voice… is the voice of a full-blooded man airing his passions… alternately misanthropic and sentimental, enraged and hilarious.”—People
 
“The man, quite simply, is a master.”—The Bloomsbury Review
 
“A record as important and lovely as Muir’s or Thoreau’s.”—New York Post
 
“One of our foremost Western essayists and novelists. A militant conservationist, he has attracted a large following—not only within the ranks of Sierra Club enthusiasts and 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—a kind of spirit not imitable, limited only to the highest class of literary outlaws.”—The Denver Post
 
“Abbey is a gadfly with a stinger like a scorpion.”—Wallace Stegner
 
“In his own inimitable fashion, Abbey prevails among the scant handful of our best and brightest fresh-air scribes.”—Chicago Sun-TimesEdward Abbey, a self-proclaimed “agrarian anarchist,” was hailed as the “Thoreau of the American West.” Known nationally as a champion of the individual and one of this country’s foremost defenders of the natural environment, he was the author of twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and The Journey Home. In 1989, at the age of sixty-two, Edward Abbey died in Oracle, Arizona.US

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