Introduction to Edward Abbey
Meet Edward Paul Abbey, twentieth-century polemicist and desert
anarchist, a character of elaborate contradictions and
eccentricities whose words either infuriated or delighted his
readers.
In a career spanning four decades, he wrote passionately in defense
of the Southwest and its inhabitants, often mocking the mindless
bureaucratic forces hell-bent on destroying it. "Resist much, obey
little," from Walt Withman, was this warrior's motto.
While he was alive, attempts to label him in conventional terms
nearly always fell short because he was neither left-wing nor
right-wing, nor was he an outlaw. Abbey was a genuine rebel who
simply did not believe in the moderns industrial way of life. He
wrote against the grain, always choosing the path of the greatest
resistance. Beginning in the 1950s, he depicted the Southwest not
as a virgin utopia peopled by rugged individualists, but as a
region under siege because of government and corporate greed, its
people at risk of being cut off from the primary wellspring of
their spiritual strength - the wild places. He's been dead for a
while now, but the legend keeps in growing.
