A thing of beauty. . . . A wildly funny, infinitely wise, near to tragic tale of man against the bog god machine. --Houston Chronicle

Edward Abbey's classic tale of rebellion, camaraderie, and environmental justice--a prescient, comic masterpiece of destructive mayhem and outrageous civil disobedience that speaks to us today

Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved Southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the power--taking on the strip miners, clear-cutters, and the highway, dam, and bridge builders who are threatening the natural habitat. The Monkey Wrench Gang is on the move--and peaceful coexistence be damned!

This is not primarily a book about the desert, writes Edward Abbey in his introduction. In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desertis a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. What I have tried to do then is something a bit different. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.

From acclaimed author and literary genius Edward Abbey comes this classic novel that inspired the motion picture Lonely Are The Brave--a stirring and unforgettable tribute to the American hero and the American West.

We are living. . . among punishments and ruins. For those that know this, Edward Abbey's books remain an indispensable solace. -- Wendell Berry

The Brave Cowboy is a classic of modern Western literature. It follows Jack Burns, a loner at odds with modern civilization. He rides a feisty chestnut mare across the New West--a once beautiful land now smothered beneath airstrips and superhighways. An anarchist cowboy, he lives by a personal code of ethics that sets him on a collision course with the keepers of law and order. After a prison breakout plan goes awry, he finds himself and his horse, Whisky, pursued across the desert towards the mountains that lead to Mexico, and to freedom. With local law enforcement, the feds, and the military on their tails, the cowboy and his horse race towards their destiny.

Edward Abbey's account of two summers spent in southeastern Utah's canyonlands is surely one of the most enduring works of contemporary American nature writing. In it he tells of his stint as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, of his love for the natural beauty that surrounded him, and of his distaste for the modernizing improvements designed to increase visitation to the park.

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 but eventually developed a loyal enough following in paperback to earn Abbey the nature writer label he claims never to have wanted.

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 Way 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.

The Thoreau of the American West. -- Larry McMurty, author of Lonesome Dove

A half-century after its original publication, Edward Abbey's classic 1962 novel, Fire on the Mountain, still retains its beauty, power, and relevance. Now with a new introduction by New York Times bestseller Douglas Brinkley (The Wilderness Warrior, Walter Cronkite), this extraordinary tale by the legendary icon of the environmentalism movement and author of The Monkey Wrench Gang proudly celebrates rugged American individualism, as it tells the story of one tough old loner's stand against the combined, well-armed forces of government that are determined to clear him from his land.

This superb sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel that was called ribald, outrageous, and, in fact, scandalous by Smithsonian, is finally available in paperback. Hayduke, an ex-Green Beret and wilderness avenger, was last seen hanging from a cliff, under fire from both a helicopter and a posse. Now he's back, fighting against the despoilers of the earth.

Edward Abbey was born in Home, Pennsylvania, in 1927. He was educated at the University of New Mexico and the University of Edinburgh. He died at his home in Oracle, Arizona, in 1989.

Devoted Abbey fans along with readers just discovering his work will find a mother lode of treasures here: generous chunks of his best novels, including The Brave Cowboy, Black Sun, and his classic The Monkey Wrench Gang; and more than a score of his evocative, passionate, trenchant essays--a genre in which he produced acknowledged masterpieces such as Desert Solitaire. Scattered throughout are the author's own petroglyph-style sketches.

This new edition adds selections from work that appeared shortly before Abbey's death: a chapter from Hayduke Lives!, the hilarious sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang; excerpts from his revealing journals; and examples of his poetry. A new foreword by Doug Peacock--Abbey's close friend and the model for the flamboyant activist Hayduke--offers a fond appreciation of this larger-than-life figure in American letters.

A thing of beauty. . . . A wildly funny, infinitely wise, near to tragic tale of man against the bog god machine. --Houston Chronicle

A special 50th anniversary edition of Edward Abbey's classic tale of rebellion, camaraderie, and environmental justice--a prescient, comic masterpiece of destructive mayhem and outrageous civil disobedience that speaks to us today--with an introduction by Douglas Peacock, the inspiration for Abbey's character, George Hayduke.

When Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke returns from war to find his beloved Southwestern desert threatened by industrial development, it's up to him to take the noxious bull by the horns. Joining forces with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, Hayduke is primed to fight the power. Strip miners, clear-cutters, and highway, dam, and bridge builders beware!

Now, fifty years after the original publication, the Monkey Wrench Gang is on the move again. Featuring a new introduction by one of today's most exciting contemporary writers, this beautiful and collectible anniversary edition of the environmental cult classic is a tribute to Abbey's enduring legacy and a timeless call to arms for preserving the natural world.

Jonathan Troy is a brilliant, beautiful, intensely romantic, selfish and irresponsible (but never impossible) hero. Despite his youth, he is a born leader who, like a colossus, dominates the people who come into his life, whether they have sought him out or have been sought after by him. There is his lonely, one-eyed father whose radical activity for the Industrial Workers of the World leads to a shattering climax in which Jonathan knows his own fidelity has somehow been vitally involved. There is Etheline, whose body is irresistibly attractive-and whom Jonathan successfully seduces. There is Leafy who inspires his love and alone can discipline him. There is Feathersmith, the effeminate teacher, who encourages Jonathan's sensitivity to the poetic, and Fatgut, the pathological liar, who is foil both for Jonathan's friendship and his rage. In a way, Jonathan betrays them all, but his greatest, final betrayal is perhaps of himself.

Edward Abbey writes with perception that measures the mood and experiences of his characters in every dimension. Beneath the facade of callous brutality lies the real Jonathan, finely sensitive and introspective. The author never loses touch with this spirit on Jonathan's quest, and the cumulative effect becomes overwhelming. This harsh, powerful, disturbing story is an extraordinary achievement for any novel, much less a first one.

Edward Abbey was born in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, in 1927. Eight months before his 18th birthday, when he would be faced with being drafted into the U.S. Military, Abbey decided to explore the American southwest. He traveled by foot, bus, hitchhiking, and freight train hopping.

His best-known works include Desert Solitaire, a non-fiction autobiographical account of his time as a park ranger at Arches National Park considered to be an iconic work of nature writing and a staple of early environmentalist writing; the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by environmentalists and groups defending nature by various means, also called eco-warriors.

JONATHAN TROY was begun as a creative writing project and is Edward Abbey's first novel.

The Fool's Progress, the fat masterpiece as Edward Abbey labeled it, is his most important piece of writing: it reveals the complete Ed Abbey, from the green grass of his memory as a child in Appalachia to his approaching death in Tuscon at age sixty two.

When his third wife abandons him in Tucson, boozing, misanthropic anarchist Henry Holyoak Lightcap shoots his refrigerator and sets off in a battered pick-up truck for his ancestral home in West Virginia. Accompanied only by his dying dog and his memories, the irascible warhorse (a stand-in for the real Abbey) begins a bizarre cross-country odyssey--determined to make peace with his past--and to wage one last war against the ravages of progress.

A profane, wildly funny, brash, overbearing, exquisite tour de force. -- The Chicago Tribune

The timeless novel that chronicles a reckless romance in the wilderness, from Edward Abbey, one of America's foremost defenders of the natural environment.

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 kingdom. 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 his wilderness muse.

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 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 in One Life at a Time, Please.

Edward Abbey died in 1989--too soon, some said. And where have the years gone? Abbey wrote, why, into the usual vices of the romantic realist: into sloth and melancholy, love and marriage and the begetting of children, into the strenuous maneuvers of earning a living without living to earn, into travel and play and music and drink and talk and laughter, into saving the world--but saving the world was only a hobby. Into watching cloud formations float across our planetary skies. But mostly into sloth and melancholy. And I don't regret a moment of it.

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.

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

Abbey, our foremost ecological philosopher, has a voice like no other. He can be wildly funny, ferociously acerbic, and unexpectedly moving as he ardently champions our natural wilderness and castigates those who would ravish it for the perverse pleasure of profit.

With this boldly satirical imaginary world, Abbey asks us to look around and take stock of what we value--before it is too late.

This book is different from any other Edward Abbey book. It includes essays, travel pieces 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.