However, it was Desert Solitaire’s angry denunciation of human interference with desert wilderness that first propelled Abbey to the forefront of the emerging environmental movement of the 1960s. This widely read novel is often called the Bible of the Earth First! movement, which took up the novel’s idea of sabotaging or “monkeywrenching” environmental offenders such as dams, lumber operations, or polluting factories. He also continued to espouse Desert Solitaire’s environmental themes later in life, in works such as The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975).

Even after the success of Desert Solitaire made it no longer financially necessary, Abbey would go on taking seasonal work as a ranger. Abbey worked at a series of part-time jobs while he wrote, becoming a road inspector for the U.S. The story of a traditional cowboy confronted and ultimately crushed by the forces of modernity in the new West, The Brave Cowboy was made into the critically acclaimed film Lonely Are the Brave (1962), starring Kirk Douglas. He began his writing career as a novelist in the 1950s, scoring a modest success with The Brave Cowboy (1958).

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the WildernessĪn essay set in the American Southwest in the late 1950s and 1960s published in New York City in 1968.ĭrawing on journals written during seasonal work as a National Park Service ranger, Edward Abbey meditates on the solitary life in the desert and protests against human encroachment on its frafile environments.Įvents in History at the Time of the Essayīorn and raised in rural Appalachian Pennsylvania, Edward Abbey (1927-89) began his lifelong love affair with the Southwest as an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where after graduation he went on to earn a master’s degree in philosophy.

Desert solitaire