Edward Abbey

When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road and many other critically acclaimed books vividly captures the essence of his life during three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah. This is a rare view of a quest to experience nature in its purest form--the silence, the struggle, the overwhelming beauty. But this is also the gripping, anguished cry of a man of character who challenges the growing exploitation of the wilderness by oil and mining interests, as well as by the tourist industry.Abbey's observations and challenges remain as relevant now as the day he wrote them. Today, Desert Solitaire asks if any of our incalculable natural treasures can be saved before the bulldozers strike again.

Ed Abbey called The Monkey Wrench Gang, his 1975 novel, a "comic extravaganza." Some readers have remarked that the book is more a comic book than a real novel, and it's true that reading this incendiary call to protect the American wilderness requires more than a little of the old willing suspension of disbelief.The story centers on Vietnam veteran George Washington Hayduke III, who returns to the desert to find his beloved canyons and rivers threatened by industrial development. On a rafting trip down the Colorado River, Hayduke joins forces with feminist saboteur Bonnie Abbzug, wilderness guide Seldom Seen Smith, and billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., and together they wander off to wage war on the big yellow machines, on dam builders and road builders and strip miners. As they do, his characters voice Abbey's concerns about wilderness preservation ("Hell of a place to lose a cow," Smith thinks to himself while roaming through the canyonlands of southern Utah. "Hell of a place to lose your heart. Hell of a place... to lose. Period").Moving from one improbable situation to the next, packing more adventure into the space of a few weeks than most real people do in a lifetime, the motley gang puts fear into the hearts of their enemies, laughing all the while. It's comic, yes, and required reading for anyone who has come to love the desert.

The Fool's Progress, the "fat masterpiece" as Edward Abbey labeled it, is his most important piece of it reveals the complete Ed Abbey, from the green grass of his memory as a child in Appalachia to his approaching death in Tuscon at age sixty two. When his third wife abandons him in Tucson, boozing, misanthropic anarchist Henry Holyoak Lightcap shoots his refrigerator and sets off in a battered pick-up truck for his ancestral home in West Virginia. Accompanied only by his dying dog and his memories, the irascible warhorse (a stand-in for the "real" Abbey) begins a bizarre cross-country odyssey--determined to make peace with his past--and to wage one last war against the ravages of "progress.""A profane, wildly funny, brash, overbearing, exquisite tour de force." -- The Chicago Tribune

The sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang featuring the ex-Green Beret George Washington Hayduke who was thought dead, but lives to fight again. The author has also written Desert Solitaire and Fool's Progress.

The Journey Home ranges from the surreal cityscapes of Hoboken and Manhattan to the solitary splendor of the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. It is alive with ranchers, dam builders, kissing bugs, and mountain lions. In a voice edged with chagrin, Edward Abbey offers a portrait of the American West that we’ll not soon forget, offering us the observations of a man who left the urban world behind to think about the natural world and the myths buried therein. Abbey, our foremost “ecological philosopher,” has a voice like no other. He can be wildly funny, ferociously acerbic, and unexpectedly moving as he ardently champions our natural wilderness and castigates those who would ravish it for the perverse pleasure of profit.

Edward Abbey was a hero to environmentalists and rebels of every stripe. With Fire on the Mountain, this literary giant of the New West gave readers a powerful, moving, and enduring tale that gloriously celebrates the undying spirit of American individualism. This fiftieth anniversary edition, with an introduction by historian Douglas Brinkley, reminds readers of Abbey's powerful conviction that "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."John Vogelin's land is his life--a barren stretch of New Mexican wilderness mercifully bypassed by civilization. Then the government moves in. And suddenly the elderly, mule-stubborn rancher is confronting the combined land-grabbing greed of the county sheriff, the Department of the Interior, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the U.S. Air Force. But a tough old man is like a mountain lion: if you back him into a corner, he'll come out fighting.

"Be of good cheer," the war-horse Edward Abbey advises, "the military-industrial state will soon collapse." This sparkling book, which takes us up and down rivers and across mountains and deserts, is the perfect antidote to despair.Along the way, Abbey makes time for Thoreau while he takes a hard look at the MX missile system, slated for the American West. "For 23 years now I've been floating rivers. Always downstream, the easy and natural way. The way Huck Finn and Jim did it, LaSalle and Marquette, the mountain men, and Major Powell."

Jack Burnes is a loner at odds with modern civilization. A man out of time, he rides a feisty chestnut mare across the New West; a once beautiful land smothered beneanth airstrips and superhighways. And he lives by a personal code of ethics that sets him on a collision course with the keepers of law and order. Now he has stepped over the line by breaking one too many of society's rules. The hounds of justice are hot in his trail. But Burnes would rather die than spend even a single night behind bars. And they have to catch him first.

A rugged forest ranger finds himself being romantically drawn to a young American girl

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.

Very good+ in glossy brown wrappers. First edition - First printing, a trade paperback, issued simultaneously with hardcover. Essays about the desert, the Coloroda River, the Sea of Cortes, Alaska and more - an introduction to some special pockets of wilderness still remaining. 203 pp.

From stories about cattlemen, fellow critics, his beloved desert, cities, and technocrats to thoughts on sin and redemption, this is one of our most treasured writers at the height of his powers.

In Good News, Edward Abbey's acclaimed underground classic, the West is wild again. American civilization as the twentieth century knew it has crumbled. In the great Southwest, a new breed or settler, white and Indians together, is creating a new way of life in the wilderness - a pastoral economy - with skills and savvy resurrected from the pre-industrial past. Meanwhile, in a last surviving bastion of urban life, the remnats of the power elite are girding their armed forces to reimpose the old order. This is a land of horses and motorcycles, high-tech weaponry and primitive courage, and the struggle for the American future is mounting in intensity. No quarter is asked or given, and the outcome hangs in perilous balance against a background of magnificent nature and eternal human verities.

For the first time in softcover, Edward Abbey’s last book, a collection of unforgettable barbs of wisdom from the best-selling author of The Monkey Wrench Gang.Notes from a Secret JournalEdward Abbey on:Government—“Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by a government against its own people.”Sex—“How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out of Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.”New York City—“New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?”Literature—“Henry James. Our finest lady novelist.”

Edward Abbey was an anarchist, activist, philosopher, and the spiritual father of the environmental movement. He was also a passionate journal keeper, a man who filled page after page with notes, philosophical musings, character sketches, illustrations, musical notations, and drawings. His "scribbling," as he called it, began in 1948, when he served as a motorcycle MP in postwar Italy, and continued until his death in 1989, totaling twenty-one volumes.His journals are the closest thing to an Abbey autobiography we will ever have. They reveal his first youthful philosophical ruminations about art, love, literature, and anarchy as a student at Edinburgh, follow his wanderings through Europe, Scandinavia, and the eastern United States and finally to his spiritual home, the American West; record his many loves and marriages; and chronicle his lifelong struggle to preserve the disappearing southwestern wilderness, as well as his bitter and often hilarious disputes with the East Coast intelligentsia. His journals contain the first inklings—backgrounds, narrative pictures, and sketches—of his hard hitting, popular, irreverent published works. But perhaps most important, they offer us a portrait of Abbey the man: the friend, enemy, husband, lover, loner, writer, and fiery environmentalist who forever changed the way we look at the American West.Edited by Abbey's good friend, writer David Petersen, Confessions of a Barbarian presents the best of these previously unpublished journals for the first time, illustrated with Abbey's own sketches.

This book is different from any other Edward Abbey book. It includes essays, travel pieces and fictions to reveal Ed's life directly, in his own words.The selections gathered here are arranged chronologically by incident, not by date of publication, to offer Edward Abbey's life from the time he was the boy called Ned in Home, Pennsylvania, until his death in Tucson at age 62. A short note introduces each of the four parts of the book and attempts to identify what's happening in the author's life at the time. When relevant, some details of publishing history are provided.

“But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.” And write letters Ed Abbey did. In his famous — or infamous — 45-year career, Abbey’s cards and letters became as legendary as his books for their wit, vitriol, and ability to speak truth to power. Published here for the first time, the letters offer a fascinating, often hilarious glimpse into the mind of one of America’s most iconoclastic and beloved authors. No subject was too banal, too arcane, or too deep for Abbey to expound on: sex, cheerleaders, Mormons, Aspen, and the Bond girls are covered as gleefully as Stegner, Dylan, Chomsky, Buddhism, and betrayal. Whether scolding an editor to simplify (“I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of fly-shit on the typescript”) or skewering the chicken-hawk proponents of the war in Vietnam, Abbey’s righteous indignation gives hope and inspiration to a generation that desperately needs both.

EDWARD ABBEY continues to grow in stature as one of America's funniest and most profound twentieth-century writers. Brooding, iconoclastic, prophetic, Abbey was principally known as a prose writer, the author of such legendary works as The Monkey Wrench Gang, Desert Solitaire, and The Brave Cowboy.Although Abbey rarely published his poetry, he was, unbeknownst to his loyal and often fanatical public, a passionate producer of verse, and these seventy-one original poems—never before published in any form (although several were rejected by the leading magazines of the nation)—offer an insightful and wrenching look into the mind of this great man known to some as "Cactus Ed." To read these poems, all written between 1952 and 1989, and culled from his Journals, is to feel the ineffable, irrefutable essence of Edward Abbey. The poems frequently alternate between the joy and pain that marked his life, and all brandish his immutable character and nonconformity.Whether writing about his love of wild doves, his unadulterated hatred of New York City, or his fondness for bawdy women, Abbey was unapologetically passionate—and these poems will only add to his literary reputation and mythic stature.Not bad for a spud-digging farm boy out of rural Pennsylvania.

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

COLLECTIBLE - NEW Soft cover BRAND NEW COPY w/trace edge weat to softcover. Anthology. Selected, by Edward Abbey (1927-1989) himself, chapters from novels published between 1954-1982. Abbey chose what he thought was "both the best of most representative" of his 's writings. Excerts from Jonathan Troy (1954), The Brave Cowboy (1956), Fire on the Mountain (1962), Appalachian Wilderness (1970), Black Sun (1971), The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), The Journey Home (1977), Abbey's Road (1979), Good News (1980), Down the River (1982), and The Rites of Spring (at the point of publication, a work in porgress).The title, "Slumgullion Stew", refers to a popluar hobo stew into which anything edible is throw in.

Here is a majestic portrait of the Appalachians -- from the wonders of its natural beauty to its fascinating history. In 48 Full-color Photographs of veiled mountains, lush woodlands, rushing highland streams, and fields of dazzling wildflowers, Eliot Porter captures the extraordinary beauty of the Smoky Mountains and the surrounding wilderness. Edward Abbey's text, filled with the sensitive insights and idiosyncratic perspective that characterize all his works, explores the human history of Appalachia, describing the native Cherokees and the mountaineers who followed them. In a moving epilogue, Harry Caudill discusses the lives of the mountain people today.

A pictorial exposition of the natural wonders that fashion the Utah wilderness, supplemented by personal thoughts on the reasons for its conservation

Ten selections taken from Desert Solitaire, The Journey Home, Abbey's Road, and Down the River convey Abbey's stance against the development of the American West and the destruction of its wilderness. 2 cassettes.

From American author and essaying Edward Abbey comes three of his most popular novels. Fire on the Mountain: Billy Vogelin Starr returns home to his beloved New Mexico after nine months away at school only to find his grandfather in a standoff with the United States Government. It seems the government wants to take his land and turn it into an extension of the White Sands Missile Range. Though facing the combined powers of the U.S. County Sheriff, the Department of the Interior, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the U.S. Air Force, John Vogelin stands his ground. His land is his life and when backed into a corner, a tough old man like him will come out fighting. The Monkey Wrench Gang: Vietnam veteran George Washington Hayduke III returns home to the desert only to find his beloved canyons and rivers now threatened by industrial development. Joining forces with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and social outcast mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the power and take on the strip miners, clear cutters, as well as the highway, dam, and bridge builders who are threatening to destroy the natural habitat. With the Monkey Wrench Gang newly formed, the team sets out to destroy eyesores and protect their environment’s natural beauty. Hayduke Lives!: George Washington Hayduke III was last seen clinging to a rock face in the wilds of Utah as an armed posse hunted him down for his eco-radicalist crimes. Now he is back with a fiery need for vengeance. Hayduke teams up with his old pals Doc Sarvis, Seldom Seen Smith, and Bonnie Abbzug in a battle against the world’s biggest earth-moving machine. Fundamentalist preacher Dudley Love, the mastermind behind “G O L I A T H,” wants to turn the Grand Canyon into a uranium mine, but not if eco-warrior Hayduke and his group of committed environmentalist friends have anything to say about it.

A Chanticleer Press Edition. Photos by David Muench and text by Edward Abbey. Bound in publisher's original beige cloth with the spine stamped in orange and in a beige cloth covered slipcase with the covers stamped in orange. Folio measures 17 by 10 5/8 inches. Slipcase measures 17 5/8 by 10 7/8 inches.

From the dustjacket: Jonathan Troy is a brilliant, beautiful, thirstily romantic, selfish and irresponsible (but never impossible) hero. Despite his youth, he is a born leader who, like a colossus, dominates the people who come into his life, whether they have sought him out or have been sought after by him. There is his lonely one-eyed father whose radical activity for the Industrial Workers of the World leads to a shattering climax in which Jonathan knows his own fidelity has somehow been vitally involved. There is Etheline, whose body is irrestibly attractive - until Jonathan accomplishes her seduction. There is Leafy who inspires his love and alone can discipline him. There is Feathersmith, the effeminate teacher, who encourages Jonathan's sensitivity to the poetic; and Fatgut, the pathological liar, who is foil both for Jonathan's friendship and his rage. In a way, Jonathan betrays them all, but his greatest, final betrayal is perhaps himself.Edward Abbey writes with a perception that measures the mood and experiences of his characters in every dimension. Beneath the facade of callous brutality lies the real Jonathan, finely sensitive and morbidly romantic. The author never loses touch with this spirit on a quest, and the cumulative effect becomes overwhelming. This harsh, powerful, disturbing story is an extraordinary achievement for any novel, much less a first one.

This book is basically a collection of speeches that Edward Abbey and John Nichols gave to the Albuquerque Sierra Club to help argue for the protection of mountain lions in the surrounding area. It is considered a rare book and is difficult to find/purchase.