desert solitaire a season in the wilderness

While living in the desert, Abbey saw the effects of this corruption-namely, ugly paved roads-and it outraged him. By 1956, however, the time when Abbey began to work for this agency, Abbey felt that the Service had been compromised by government officials’ desire to develop the parks and rake in huge profits from tourists. Founded in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson intended it to protect the nation’s wilderness. National Park Service is the foundational context of Abbey’s book. For these two influential works, and for his angry presence as a public figure, Abbey is regarded is an essential figure in the environmentalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Abbey continued to publish environmentalist novels, memoirs, and political commentary until he died at age 62.

He furthered that book’s harsh political rhetoric in The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), a novel that later inspired the real-life eco-terrorist group Earth First!. Though several of Abbey’s novels became Hollywood films, this memoir, coinciding with the 1960s environmentalist movement, became his first real bestseller. Here, he kept notebooks that he would later turn into his politically charged memoir, Desert Solitaire (1968). His early love of nature-cultivated in hitchhiking trips throughout the American West-brought him at age 29 to Arches National Monument, near Moab, Utah, for a summer park ranger job. Thanks to these interests, the FBI opened a file on him “I’d be insulted if they weren’t watching me,” Abbey later bragged. Honorably discharged from a clerk position in the military-a distinction he rejected-Abbey studied the use of violence in political rebellion and openly espoused anarchy in his published essays. Born to an organist mother who taught him to love art and an anarchist father who taught him to be skeptical of the government, Edward Abbey took to literature and politics at a very young age.

Desert solitaire a season in the wilderness