[In the following essay, Twining explores the deeper, often critically neglected, philosophical complexity of Abbey's works.]

As time goes on, it's becoming clearer that Edward Abbey's novels and essays have greater heft than criticism of them has so far shown itself able to acknowledge. Popular since the publication of The Brave Cowboy in 1956, Abbey became a dynamic personal presence in the public drama over ecological conflicts after Desert Solitaire, published in 1968. In short, Abbey became a prominent voice in a centrally important American political struggle, still ongoing. That is more than enough for many people. As time goes on, though, and we look deeper into what has seemed Abbey's open and easy books, the Abbey we thought we knew fits less and less well into the seemingly obvious categories we have wanted to contain him in. He keeps spilling over them, running away.

The first problem is that this easy-voiced humorous populist—this lover of the common man (and woman) who spoke so fluent and natural a colloquial American English—more and more reveals himself as a master stylist whose surfaces have gulled us into believing his mind is as lyric and transparent as his voice. The politics he engaged with, and the drama of the politics implicit or explicit in Abbey's writing, have foregrounded themselves—perhaps inevitably, given the importance that ecological consciousness has increasingly assumed throughout the developed world in the last half century. Part of the fun, and the relevance, of Abbey has been his resonant, witty, and uncompromising voice in this centrally important discussion about the direction our burgeoning civilization is taking us. Abbey has been a leader. His voice has been a coherent, rational, and yet humorously passionate one in defense of wilderness and against short-sighted destruction in the name of economic exploitation, promoting the realization that the natural world we Americans, especially, have been lucky enough to inherit matters complexly and profoundly to us. Charles Bowden perhaps said it best in identifying one of Abbey's most distinctive accomplishments: “Ed Abbey invented the Southwest we live in. He made us look at it, and when we looked up again we suddenly saw it through his eyes and sensed what he sensed—we were killing the last good place” (1990, 164). It is certainly true that Abbey has formulated images only inchoately present before, creating a distinctive world that is part now of our collective American imagination; he has taken his place with John C. Van Dyke, Mary Austin, Joseph Wood Krutch, and others as part of that small, distinguished body of writers who have imaginatively created for us our now-shared sense of the desert Southwest—and its transcendent value.

Underlying this numinous vision of the Southwest, however, is a deeper nexus of ideas undergirding another valuation of nature altogether: underneath the dramatic politics of our time in defense of wilderness are deeper philosophic tenets that have been present and coherent throughout Abbey's writing career. His explicit defense of anarchism is well known to readers, documented, for instance, in the pithy four-page “Theory of Anarchy” in his last collection of essays, published the year before his death (One Life at a Time, Please [1988]). “Anarchy is democracy taken seriously,” he wrote there (26). Throughout his writing life, Abbey made it clear that he was a realist, one who obdurately insisted on the unavoidable primary importance of the material world that manifests itself to our (unignorable) senses. In one of his journals he wrote, “The world is really nothing but an idea in the mind of God, say the physicist-orientalist-mystics. To which my response is: So what? Who cares? What difference does that make? We still have to live in the world of actual daily experience, of all those hard objects and firm living bodies that certainly appear to share the world with us. We are not alone” (1994, 311).

But even Abbey's anarchist sympathies and principles—and his obvious, insisted upon realism—obscure for many readers a deeper philosophical seriousness and complexity, which is not to say that either Abbey's anarchism or his realism are themselves superficial, simple, or insignificant. Abbey is, first of all, a quintessential American individualist, but his uniqueness reflects the options possible in his time, which means that it takes into account the profoundly changed material circumstances of the American late twentieth century.

Let it be said simply: Abbey's writing registers major changes in the America of our time with clarity and force. The responsive chord Abbey struck with enthusiastic audiences from the beginning of his publishing career is doubtless at least partly attributable to this distinctive element in his writing. Readers have recognized that both his novels and his essays record substantive historic alterations in the material circumstances undergirding life in this country. But the novels and essays do more than that; they reveal the underlying human significance in those material changes, the profound alteration in the mental landscape all Americans perforce survey. Both material circumstances and mental landscape will alter even more significantly in the foreseeable future, and Abbey is supremely articulate in demonstrating the true character of our loss.

Certain fragments Abbey does attempt to shore against our ruins. He is in this sense a prophet for many of his readers; a prophet both because he foresaw and warned against the diminished future we are all in fact demonstrably rushing into, and because he inveighed against that as an evil in a positively Old Testament fashion. It cannot be stated too strongly: Abbey's writing is about the real world, our world, about historic changes taking place in his and our America, and his conviction that those changes are profoundly significant for us.

Abbey's mode as a writer had nothing to do with “magic realism” or any other contemporary experimental narrative and structural techniques—except movies, and that in a small way. Rather, Abbey wrote in both his novels and his essays as what he essentially was: a contemporary American product of the Enlightenment. He was a rationalist and, in a fundamental sense, a materialist. He insisted, first to last, on two inescapable propositions: that the world is real, and that it is knowable. Consequently, he insisted that human events and outcomes in this real, knowable world are largely controllable. Because they are so, he affirmed, we have the absolute and inescapable moral and civic responsibility to commit ourselves to shaping those outcomes. That assertion of civic responsibility is, of course, a conventional one, honored in this country for a long time indeed: it has been around on these shores at least since Paine and Franklin and Jefferson, and it has found literary expression in imaginative American writers from Thoreau to Twain to Abbey himself.

A basic fact underlying Abbey's concerns can be conveyed in one stark statistic: during his sixty-two-year life, from 1927 to 1989, America's population more than doubled—from about 122 million at the time of his birth, to more than 250 million at his death. During Abbey's lifetime the United States added more people than had previously accumulated here during the entire history of immigration to this country; more people, that is, than in the four hundred years of emigration from Europe and Africa and Asia (and likely more than in the previous ten—or is it twenty?—millennia). Of course, this phenomenal rate of growth continues, thanks to current governmental policies and the business considerations largely driving them. Legal immigration in the mid-1990s is adding just under a million people a year—900,000 officially. Best estimates for illegal immigration, the figure for which is understandably uncertain, adds some large fraction of another million every year. And, thanks to tax policies that encourage multichild families and promise to do so even more in the future, the “natural” increase from excess of births over deaths drives population growth in numbers that are absolutely higher every year. Two more doublings will give America the dubious boon of attaining China's population. At the actual rate of growth prevailing during Abbey's lifetime, and continuing unabated, Abbey's descendants, and ours, may soon live in a United States with a population of one billion people.

Everyone is familiar, too, with the explosion of technology in our time—and with at least some its consequences. The increase in general wealth since the Second World War—enabling burgeoning numbers of us to buy and use everything from recreational and “all-terrain” vehicles to high-tech bicycling, hiking, skiing, and camping equipment—has compounded the effects of the enormous increase in the sheer number of us. Incalculable is the effect of cheap jet travel, which makes the entire country part of our backyard: there's hardly a place on the continent we can't reach in a single day by jet plane and the help of a rented car, no formerly unpeopled place we can't at least be on the edge of with our backpack, skis, or mountain bike. Swift and affordable access has converted the land, including what we still call “wilderness,” into a sort of consumable—one that is accessible at any given moment to whatever fraction of a quarter billion people who have the wealth, the means, and the desire to consume it. That fraction, along with our technological capabilities, increases every day.

All this, of course, involves enormous consumption of energy, electrical power, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. The proliferation of roads and all the roadside baggage of our transportation system is matched by the spread of power plants, which with their smog and tentacles of powerlines now spread over what even recently were empty, clear landscapes. These manifestations of our need for power are now hard to avoid in what were, even a few decades ago, landscapes largely devoid of man-made artifacts, in the American Southwest as elsewhere. Thoreau's observation makes more sense now than in his own time: we don't ride the railroad, it rides us. Except that our “railroads” stretch not only over the entire land, but six or seven miles into the sky as well.

These are material facts. What are their consequences? Why did all this so matter to Abbey? Why does it matter to us?

To answer, let's start with a more or less typically polemical Abbey passage, an example of style and substance both, one that is characteristic late Abbey.

The worst sleaze is on the American side of the border in downtown Brownsville, among the bars, go-go joints, and block after block of little clothing stores. Here I see one of the saddest things I've ever seen, anywhere. Inside a shop labeled Ropas Usadas (Used Clothes), a dozen weary little Mexican women, all pregnant, sit among mountains of old clothing, each woman patiently sorting through these trash piles in search of children's garments and stacking her selections in a small heap at her feet. Both temperature and humidity are in the nineties. The air in the place is stifling, swarming with flies, and dense with the unmistakable, unforgettable smell of poverty. The manager of this pen, a swarthy, greasy-haired, crossbred, snake-eyed bandito, the only male in view, waits in the corner for the women to finish their sorting and hand over their faded paper pesos. Hordes of children play outside on the slime and broken glass in the street.

Watching this intolerable, unacceptable scene, which nevertheless we tolerate and accept, I think again of Stony Pass in the San Juans, the clear, cold mountain air, the peaks covered with fresh snow, and the bright virgin waters of the Rio Grande trickling from their multitude of secret beginnings under the rocks and the tundra and the alpine flowers. The elk were on the move, through the pines and aspen; in the evenings we'd hear the bull elk bugle forth his challenge to the world. That is another world, a sort of paradise compared to this, a world that these women and most of their children will never see.

(1988, 152-53)

Although published in 1988, the year before Abbey died, this passage is representative of him early and late. Abbey was highly consistent—in his thinking, in the subjects (and juxtapositions of subjects) that inform his work, in his unchanging direct address to his central themes. Even more important, he was consistent in adhering to essential convictions: that the world is real, that we know it through our senses, and that we are compelled by an absolute moral imperative to respond to the world in a responsible way. A moral way.

Abbey was all through his life a student of philosophy, and he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico. Friends have said that until the end of his life he read philosophers for recreation. His own works, both his essays and (to a lesser extent) his novels, are replete with explicit or, not so commonly, veiled references to dozens of philosophers and historians. It is simply perverse not to recognize that Abbey spent a lifetime thinking and writing about ideas—ideas enabling and governing the way we engage with the real material world and the world of human action, the latter in some inescapable and frightening ways even more “real.” For Abbey knew that identifiable forces, practices, and institutions in the social, political, economic, and technological realms are just as determinative of our experience as the “natural” world. He knew also that these social, political, economic, and technological realities have been created by us (even if, especially if, inadvertently) over stretches of time. These worlds, Abbey insisted, create us in their turn.

Abbey never deviated from his rock-bottom certainty that such humanly created worlds share with nature the shaping of human destiny, and that they too are knowable. A corollary proposition persisting throughout Abbey's writing is that this reality and knowledge demand that we accept responsibility for our own affairs, that we come to grips with this world we inherit and at least potentially, at least partly, have control over. It is in this most basic of senses that Abbey was both a moralist and a thorough-going materialist. He never deviated from those three propositions: The world is real. We can know the world. We are responsible for it.

Everyone who has ever read anything by Abbey knows what has to be said next: that Abbey always, and emphatically, emplaced the human world within the natural one—where, he insisted, it belongs. From the appearance of his first published books, Abbey has been tabbed a “nature writer,” one of those in a large, very mixed bag that for a couple centuries has been accumulating all sorts of things, from the most sentimental and romantic to the most grittily scientific. Maybe we're now just too far from Emerson and Thoreau for us to remember that American nature writing at its most forceful has been inextricably associated with, even rooted in, philosophical and ethical thought. But it is precisely from that Emersonian-Thoreauvian tradition of thinking and writing about nature that Abbey comes. As did his transcendental progenitors of a century and a half ago, Abbey emplaces his human world within a larger natural one. And the logical clarity and moral force in the way he effects that emplacement in terms for our time is why he matters as much as he does—and one of the reasons he is so profoundly American, speaking so truly to the American ear.

That and the fact that he wrote about his quintessentially American subject beautifully, in a style simple and clear, a style splendidly apt for the coherence of his thought and his vision. Abbey wrote with a manifest life-long love for the American language, and an extraordinarily keen ear for the rhythms, vigor, and pungency of contemporary spoken American English. No modern American writer has so well captured the vitality of this oral culture, and no modern American writer more powerfully conveys the degree of involvement common people have through their speech with the mental and imaginative lives they lead. Consider, for example, the light, deft manner with which Abbey depicts the interactions between Doc Sarvis, Hayduke, and Seldom Seen Smith at that pivotal moment early in The Monkey Wrench Gang when the three plotters first hatch their plan of ecosabotage. The doctor has just realized the dangers and implications for their safety and freedom in what they contemplate: “Are you certain this canyon is not bugged?” he asks. “I have the feeling that others are listening in to every word we say.”

“I know that feeling,” Hayduke said, “but that's not what I'm thinking about right now. I'm thinking—”

“What are you thinking about?”

“I'm thinking: Why the fuck should we trust each other? I never even met you two guys before today.”

Silence. The three men stared into the fire. The oversize surgeon. The elongated riverman. The brute from the Green Berets. A sigh. They looked at one another. And one thought: What the hell. And one thought: They look honest to me. And one thought: Men are not the enemy. Nor women either. Nor little children. Not in sequence but in unison, as one, they smiled. At each other. The bottle made its penultimate round.

“What the hell,” Smith said, “we're only talkin'.”

(1975, 68)

Abbey's mastery of language is no matter of superficial stylistics: in its diction, its rhythms, and its unmistakable sane referentiality, his prose is an authentic voice of his time, of the values and feelings inhering in the language expressed in everyday American life. That is another major reason Abbey has, and always has had, such a passionately committed “following.” People have loved this voice and still recognize it immediately as genuine, authentically American, something real in the ersatz wilderness of media language.

Several times Abbey said that he thought of himself as an entertainer. Clearly one of the things he meant by that was that he intended to give expression to the powerful point of view that he knew is part of common knowledge, common experience. He knew that he could give his readers that special, genuine pleasure that comes from hearing an extraordinarily powerful, lucid voice expressing truths recognizable by most people but rarely said so independently, clearly, or memorably. The pleasure in hearing such a voice honors the sensibility that common sense and common knowledge give rise to—and rise out of.

That sort of sensibility is one of the things community ultimately depends on. Abbey expresses and revivifies that sensibility as few contemporary, media-homogenized writers seem able to. What Abbey most significantly addresses is a powerful sense of fact, an intuition for the reality of experience. Abbey has always honored that reality. “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it,” wrote Whitman in 1855 (1959, 24). The grounds for acceptance are similar for both writers. They tell truth we recognize, in a language we know is ours—ours in some special sense growing out of the direct intuition that we are as much our language as our language is us. Its strengths are our strengths, and it is its common sense that delivers our world to us.

Another element of our shared consciousness is that material well-being—or the lack of it—is an irreducible datum; it is fact, reality, commonly sensed and unrelieved, unobscured by institutionalized “higher” values that would deny it primary significance in this country of immigrants, in this democracy of mixed-up races, religions, ethnic backgrounds, and all the rest. The sense of that reality is coupled with knowledge of another great and inescapable American reality that has been determinative in our history: the fact of our immense collective wealth. Social mobility based on economic opportunity is, and has been, a reality for us, but not for most peoples, most places, through most of time. American common sense tells us that poverty and physical want are evil—and escapable. A major hope for those “huddled masses” who have come here (and are still coming) in their millions was, and is, to escape poverty, want, material deprivation. And basic to American common moral sense is the conviction that material well-being is fundamental to any reasonably entertainable vision of a good, decent life and, conversely, that poverty and physical degradation are intrinsic evils, unredeemed and unredeemable. Which takes us back to “Round River Rendezvous: The Rio Grande,” and Brownsville, Texas.

In that essay, Abbey effects what is for him an archetypal juxtaposition, nothing less than another polar opposition, when he contrasts the human “worst sleaze” he encounters at the Rio Grande's mouth on the U.S.-Mexican border with the beauty of the unpeopled natural scene at the river's headwaters near Stony Pass in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. On the one hand, he sees human degradation and suffering, the product of entrenched poverty and injustice: the “intolerable, unacceptable scene, which nevertheless we tolerate and accept.” On the other, he sees “another world, a sort of paradise compared to this, a world that these women and most of their children will never see” (152-53).

Abbey dedicated his 1977 collection of essays, The Journey Home, to his mother and father. His father, he said, “taught me to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless.” Eleven years later, in “A Writer's Credo,” Abbey wrote that “the writer worthy of his calling must be more than an entertainer: he must be a seer, a prophet, the defender of life, freedom, openness, and always—always—a critic of society” (1988, 174). The connection between the passion for social justice and for nature is manifest in all of Abbey's work: no other modern American writer so vividly saw that the unspoiled nature we've been lucky enough to inherit powerfully enables a critique of our society.

Although he clearly demanded much out of his own writing, Abbey frequently assailed mystifications and religiously conventional pieties in his fellow writers. In one (of many) scathing passages from his journals, reproduced in Confessions of a Barbarian (1994), he describes his aversion to aspects of Annie Dillard's writing (toward which he continued to be ambivalent), saying that “Dillard is, I believe, the only contemporary ‘nature writer’ who deliberately attempts to imitate [Thoreau]: the transcendentalist style, the high-flown (fly-blown) rhetoric, the raving about God. People who rave about God make me nervous” (1994, 254).

Parts of Abbey's journals also make clear what other passages clarify even further, especially in his later writing: that his regard for nature had multiple and deep roots, and was tantalizingly deeper than aesthetic appreciation. In one representative passage from the journals, he says, “My concern for wilderness is not aesthetic but physical, sensual, empathetic, spiritual, political, but above all moral: all beings are created equal, all are endowed by their Creator (whatever—God or Evolution or Nature) with certain inalienable rights. Among these rights are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. …” (1994, 299).

In the passage from “Round River Rendezvous” quoted above, Abbey refers to the Colorado headwaters of the Rio Grande as a sort of paradise. Of course, in our historic religious traditions, “Paradise” is the place of perfect innocence, purity, and freedom from sin, degradation, suffering, and loss. It is a place of perfect justice, where man and all creation existed in harmony with God—before, of course, man's notorious disobedience and fall from God's favor. But Abbey clearly intended his use of the time-encrusted word to carry more modern and material associations.

For Abbey, the social and economic depravity that gives rise to such scenes of sordidness, degradation, hopelessness, debasement, and suffering as he witnesses in Brownsville's seamy stores selling “ropas usadas” constitutes an unforgivable insult to his (and, he hoped, our communally shared) moral sense. It is an insult to his sense of justice and his conviction that poverty, squalor, and human want amidst plenty are evil simply in themselves. But there is something further here. Abbey's frame of reference goes beyond the societal, political, and economic in a highly significant way—a way, nevertheless, not at all new with him. His sense of insult obviously rests not just in an awareness of the comparative degrees of material well-being on human scales, but in some philosophically absolute scale, rooted in an intense consciousness of the cosmic rightness he contemplated at the Rio Grande's headwaters in the mountains of Colorado.

Abbey repeatedly juxtaposes scenes of human degradation and suffering, usually in the cities, with a countervailing reality. That reality is an acute awareness of the existence of another world altogether, a world fully as real and in a profound way more commanding to the intellect because we know it signifies something far more permanent than any manifestation of the human. That world, we know when we think about it, will return after all our cities have disappeared into the dust, taking all our seemingly substantial interlocking institutions with them. Abbey shared this vision of an inevitably transient civilization with his great twentieth-century predecessor Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers expressed the view in many poems, among them “Carmel Point,” a poem Abbey partially reprints in“A San Francisco Journal” (qtd. in Abbey 1988, 72). After personifying the landscape of his California seaside home, Jeffers attributes to the land “The extraordinary patience of things” in the face of man's despoliation of Carmel Point's natural beauty:

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we are made from.

(1988-1991, 3:399)

In another poem, and a more temperate mood, Jeffers modifies the implications in his vision of mankind's future, a vision manifestly close to Abbey's own expectations and hopes for the future. In “November Surf,” he speaks of a change in which humanity is better able to fulfill some of its nobler potentialities:

The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,
Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up the long coast
Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:
The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous,
The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains
The dignity of room, the value of rareness.

(1988-1991, 2:159)

Such kinships of vision make it impossible not to recognize that Abbey belongs in a line of philosophical American seekers of meaning in nature who were critics of their societies, often mordantly satirical critics—a line stretching all the way from Emerson and which includes Jeffers. But to see that is to find ourselves in the challenging position of having to recognize that this same Abbey, who is a modern Enlightenment rationalist materialist, is also a powerful moralist. His vision is based in his affinity with the long, classic American search for a morality based in our intuitive sense of the grandness of American nature.

The writer's task, Abbey wrote, is essentially the matter of “getting straight the connections between the fate of the author's fictional characters and the nature of the society which largely determines that fate” (1988, 171). But throughout his writing career he affirmed more clearly, more meaningfully, and more consistently than any other writer of our time that all societies, real or imagined, exist within the larger world of nature. A proper valuation of that nature, he always argued explicitly or implicitly, enables a morality, and the morality is a social and political one, based on grounds of reason.

Which only brings us around again to the central questions with Abbey, the inescapable and supremely difficult questions: What is it about nature that makes it signify so much to Abbey? And why does the preservation of some significant measure of it constitute a moral crusade to conserve some essential element in our shared American culture, indeed our national identity?

It is tempting to conclude that what so exercises Abbey is simply the knowledge that the balance between human world and natural world which he and we have known is now rapidly disappearing forever. The central anxiety in Abbey is that what will replace it is quite simply symbolized by those stores selling “ropas usadas” in places like Brownsville, Texas. For him, and for many who read him, the ongoing, far-advanced destruction of the natural world leaves the other as the face of the future, the specter of our fate.

Abbey's reaction is moral horror rooted in what can only be called revulsion at the actual human degradation he witnesses—and fears as the impending condition for a human race severed from its spiritual rootedness in a proper valuation of unpeopled nature. It therefore has to be said that Abbey's sensibility is founded in something very like a religious sense of the sacrality of unspoiled nature itself. Abbey never “raved about God”—for very sound, very sophisticated reasons entrenched in the history of Western philosophy. (Abbey did not look east, as Eliot and others have.) His kinship in this is with such highly modern minds as that of Spinoza, who saw Nature as God, God as Nature. Abbey mentally dueled with Spinoza through much of his life, but to detail the nature of such philosophical kinships would require other essays—or books. Suffice it to say that Abbey regarded our material world as real: some of it holy, some of it diabolical. And he knew that we, unfortunately, have to play God with our world, the only one we have.

For such reasons, we have to concede that when Abbey wrote in his introduction to Desert Solitaire that “For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces—in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. … What else is there? What else do we need?” (1991, xi), he was throwing down a gauntlet that challenges us as much now as then. The world is real. Like Whitman's affirmation that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (1959, 25), Abbey's democratic acceptance of life, the world, and the people in it constitutes in itself a compelling argument because it is so manifestly rooted in apodictic (to use one of his philosophical words) sanity. The world is real—there to be loved, revered—and the humanly created world in its imperfections is there to be corrected, truly humanized, brought into concord with the unsullied nature that is the ground of its being. In actuality as religiously passionate as Jeffers, Abbey presents a humane vision based in his own, more modern “Inhumanism”—a sense of the inescapable groundedness of all human experience and human works in a fragile, vulnerable material world deserving better of us than it is getting.

Like Whitman, Abbey was an optimist whose optimism was founded in a belief in the essential good sense and good will of ordinary people—not their institutions, not their governments, not their economic systems. Abbey tells us in his essay “A Writer's Credo,” originally delivered as a lecture at Harvard in May 1985, that “I write to make a difference. ‘It is always a writer's duty,’ said Samuel Johnson, ‘to make the world better’” (1988, 178). To honor Abbey's implicit hope, to take the first step toward honoring his sense of the writer's duty, the least we can do is to understand him as well as our critical tools for understanding will allow.

Works Cited

Abbey, Edward. 1975. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott.

———. 1977. The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West. New York: E. P. Dutton.

———. 1988. One Life at a Time, Please. New York: Henry Holt.

———. [1968] 1991. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. Reprint, New York: Ballantine.

———. 1994. Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989. Ed. David Peterson. Boston and New York: Little, Brown and Co.

Bowden, Charles. 1990. “Hey, Who Was That Ornery Guy?” Afterword to Black Sun, by Edward Abbey. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra.

Jeffers, Robinson. 1988-91. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Whitman, Walt. 1959. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: His Original Edition. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking.