Edward Abbey books

Anthologies

Collections

Non-Fiction

Standalone Novels

Edward Abbey grew up on a farm in western Pennsylvania, but the American Southwest claimed him early. At seventeen he hitchhiked west, riding freight trains through the Rockies, and the desert landscape stuck with him for the rest of his life. After military service and college at the University of New Mexico, he took seasonal work as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah. That experience became the raw material for Desert Solitaire, which is often mentioned alongside Thoreau’s Walden as one of the essential American nature books. His fiction returned again and again to loners and rebels who refuse to fit into modern institutional life – cowboys, river runners, draft resisters, and outright saboteurs.

Abbey wrote eight novels over four decades. The Brave Cowboy follows a drifter who breaks into jail to free a friend and then tries to escape across the mountains on horseback, with a posse using jeeps and helicopters in pursuit. Kirk Douglas bought the rights and starred in the 1962 film adaptation, Lonely Are the Brave. The Monkey Wrench Gang is his best-known novel, a comic adventure about four mismatched characters waging guerrilla warfare against strip mines, bridges, and dams across the Southwest. His non-fiction and essay collections – including The Journey Home, Abbey’s Road, Down the River, and One Life at a Time, Please – mix backcountry travel writing with blunt arguments about public land, overdevelopment, and what he saw as Americans trading freedom for convenience. He died in 1989 and was illegally buried by friends in the Arizona desert, as he had requested.