Best Selling Books by Edward Abbey

A book about Edward Abbey's life as a park ranger in the American Southwest in the 1950's.

The Grand Canyon continues to be the most popular of our national parks. While millions gaze at its cliffs each year, only 15,000 float through the canyon on the Colorado River. A landmark portrait of the Grand Canyon, this is the only photography book to document this amazing journey from river level. Now this classic is back in print, with an updated preface and introduction and a dozen new photographs. A journal in photos and words, The Hidden Canyon captures the desert landscape and the thrill of the rapids. Edward Abbey's journal—filled with wry humor and respect for the canyon—describes the journey as the dories (small wooden boats) alternately float and charge through the breathtaking landscapes and some of the roughest white water in North America.?
?Visit the author's site at: www.johnblaustein.com.

A mix of fiction and essays by the author described as "the Thoreau of the American West" (Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post). Edward Abbey himself compiled this volume representing some of his greatest work—including selections from such novels as The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Brave Cowboy, and Black Sun, as well as a number of expressive and acerbic essays. Renowned for inspiring modern environmentalists—though his interests ranged as widely as the landscapes he loved—Abbey offers an entertaining introduction to his writing, including excerpts from the autobiographical Desert Solitaire, in addition to his own sketches illustrating the text throughout.

In this wise and lyrical book about landscapes of the desert and the mind, Edward Abbey guides us beyond the wall of the city and asphalt belting of superhighways to special pockets of wilderness that stretch from the interior of Alaska to the dry lands of Mexico.

Black Sun is a bittersweet love story involving an iconoclastic forest ranger and a freckle-faced "American princess" half his age. Like Lady Chatterley's lover, he initiates her into the rites of sex and the stark, secret harmonies of his wilderness. She, in turn, awakens in him the pleasure of love. Then she mysteriously disappears, plunging him into desolation. Black Sun is a singular novel in Abbey's repertoire, a romantic story of a solitary man's passion for the outdoors and for a woman who is seeing the natural world's true colors for the first time. "Like most honest novels, Black Sun is partly autobiographical, mostly invention, and entirely true. The voice that speaks in this book is the passionate voice of the forest," Abbey writes, "the madness of desire, and the joy of love, and the anguish of final loss."

"[From] a true independent, a self-declared extremist and 'desert mystic'. . . . outstanding essays, travel pieces, and works of fiction" — Booklist This book is different from any other Edward Abbey book. It includes essays, travel writing 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. "This anthology, edited by his longtime editor and friend Macrae, makes for a splendid summary of his best work. . . . Anyone who doesn't already know his work will find this volume, culled from more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, an addictive introduction." — Publishers Weekly "If your library is Abbey-deficient, this collection is essential." — Library Journal "The announcement of a new Abbey book, whether essays or fiction, stirs a personal craving no other current American writer can satisfy." — Los Angeles Book Review "A record as important and lovely as Muir's and Thoreau's." —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature "Abbey's work is a kind of blessed voice in the wilderness any way you take it, and a precious figure in our lethal time." —W.S. Merwin, US Poet Laureate

Excerpts from the private journals of an eccentric environmentalist feature his notes, philosophies, and character sketches

“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 Life

Thoughts on nature, politics, love, and much more—from the environmentalist and author of such classics as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang. Finished just two weeks before his death, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness is a collection of Edward Abbey's observations, both bitingly witty and inspirational, on a wide range of topics—from philosophy and writing to music, money, sex, and sports. Abbey chose each passage himself from his own journals and previous writings—and warns us in his typical humorous style that some of the notes "may be unconscious plagiarisms from the great and dead (never steal from the living and mediocre)." Abbey's last wish was to be buried in an unmarked grave somewhere out in the vast desert he loved so much. This book is an enduring signal from that desert, through the words of one of the singular American thinkers of our times.

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.

Down the River is a collection of essays both timeless and timely. It is an exploration of the abiding beauty of some of the last great stretches of American wilderness on voyages down rivers where the body and mind float free, and the grandeur of nature gives rise to meditations on everything from the life of Henry David Thoreau to the militarization of the open range. At the same time, it is an impassioned condemnation of what is being done to our natural heritage in the name of progress, profit, and security. Filled with fiery dawns, wild and shining rivers, and radiant sandstone canyons, it is charged as well with heartfelt, rampageous rage at human greed, blindness, and folly. It is, in short, Edward Abbey at his best, where and when we need him most.

Henry Lightcap, a man facing a terminal illness, sets out on a trip across America accompanied only by his dog, Solstice, and discovers the beauty and majesty of the Southwest.

Four irate rebels join forces to wage war on the stripminers, clear-cutters, and the highway and dam and bridge builders who are turning their natural habitat into a wasteland. A new Introduction by historian Brinkley puts this enduring cult classic in perspective by placing it at the forefront of an important historical movement.

Poems about love and landscapes by the author of the classic Desert Solitaire, an "environmentalist, nature writer, novelist and all-around iconoclast" ( The New York Times). While better known for his nature writing and his comic classic The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey was also an enthusiastic creator of verse. The New York Times called his memoir Desert Solitaire "deeply poetic"—and now Earth Apples gives us his actual poetry, in Abbey's first and only collection. Whether writing about vast desert landscapes, New York City, or a love of bawdy women, Abbey's verse is eloquent, irreverent, and unapologetically passionate. The poems gathered here, published digitally for the first time, are culled from Abbey's journals and give an insightful and unique glance into the mind of this literary legend.

"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"--P. [4] of cover.

"Edward Abbey (1927-1989) was a singular American writer and cult hero, as famous for books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang as he was infamous for the prickly persona of "Cactus Ed." Abbey's postcards and letters, legendary during his lifetime and collected here for the first time, convey the fullness of the man and reveal, along with his wisdom and savage wit, a tender side seldom seen before. Whether spouting on the virtues of anger, roasting hawkish proponents of Vietnam, or lending encouragement to fellow writers such as Cormac McCarthy, here we find the essential spirit of the man, intimate and revolutionary."--BOOK JACKET.