Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey was born in Home, Pennsylvania, in 1927. In 1944, at the age of 17, he set out to explore the American Southwest. Bumming around the country by hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, Abbey developed a love of the desert which would shape his life and art for the next forty years. After a brief military career, Abbey completed his education at the University of New Mexico and the University of Edinburgh. Abbey worked as a park ranger and fire lookout at several different National Parks throughout his life, experiences which provided material for his many works. He died at his home in Oracle, Arizona, in 1989, and is survived by his wife and five children.

‘His masterpiece. Despite its stated purpose as a eulogy to a lost world, it seems hardly to have aged at all. Part of the book’s staying power resides in the synthesis Abbey created between the American desert — the red-rock canyons, “Abbey’s country” — and the beautiful, hard-chiselled prose, as rough and gorgeous as the land itself, that he used to celebrate its harshness and mystery. None have matched his style’ Salon‘Like a ride on a bucking bronco . . . rough, tough, combative. The author is a rebel and an eloquent loner. His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book . . . set down in a lean, racing prose, in a close-knit style of power and beauty’ New York Times‘An American masterpiece … part memoir, part meditation on nature, part crusty and slightly mad cultural commentary’ New Yorker‘An uncommonly beautiful love letter to solitude and the spiritual rewards of getting lost. A miraculously beautiful book’ Brain Pickings‘Edward Abbey is the Thoreau of the American West’ Washington Post’Abbey’s voice, like that of Thomas Paine in Common Sense, never fades away … President Trump, please read Desert Solitaire’ Douglas Brinkley, New York Times