Desert Solitaire
Cover text
Edward Abbey's account of two summers spent in southeastern Utah's
canyonlands is one of the most enduring works of contemporary
American nature writing. In celebration of the twentieth
anniversary of the publication of Desert Solitaire, the University
of Arizona Press is pleased to make the book available once again
in a hardcover edition, featuring a new introduction by the author,
his definitive corrections to the text, and eighteen illustrations
commissioned exclusively for this volume.
"I confess to being a nature lover," admits Abbey more than thirty
years after his sojourn in the wilderness. "But I did not mean to
be mistaken for a nature writer. I never wanted to be anything but
a writer, period." First published in 1968 to "a few brief but not
hostile notices," Desert Solitaire quietly sold out of its first
printing and eventually developed a loyal following in
paperback.
Desert Solitaire lives on because it is a work that reflects
profound love of nature and a bitter abhorrence of all that would
desecrate it. "Abbey is one of our very best writers about
wilderness country," observed Wallace Stegner in the Los Angeles
Times Book Review; "he is also a gadfly with a stinger like a
scorpion." "This book may well seem like a ride on a bucking
bronco," added Edwin May Teale in the New York Times. "It is rough,
tough, combative ... passionately felt, deeply poetic." But perhaps
the spirit of the man, the work, and the circumstances of its
writing were best summarized by Larry McMurtry in his review for
the Washington Post: "Edward Abbey is the Thoreau of the American
West."
