Edward Abbey (1927-1989) was an American writer known for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. Upon graduating high school in Pennsylvania in 1945 and eight months before his 18th birthday, when he would be facing the draft, he decided to explore the American southwest. He traveled by foot, hitchhiking, bus, and train. It was during this trip that he fell in love the with the desert country of the Four Corners region, which would inhabit much of his writing, saying:
"...crags and pinnacles of naked rock, the dark cores of ancient volcanoes, a vast and silent emptiness smoldering with heat, color, and indecipherable significance, above which floated a small number of pure, clear, hard-edged clouds. For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings, the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same."
He proceeded to work as a park ranger, fire lookout, and professor. Perhaps his best known work is The Monkey Wrench Gang. Published in 1975, it was his fifth novel, and concerns the use of sabotage to protest environmentally damaging activities in the Southwestern United States. The book was so influential that the term "monkeywrench" has entered the lexicon as, besides sabotage and damage to machines, any sabotage, activism, law-making, or law-breaking to preserve wilderness, wild spaces and ecosystems. This is the first British Edition:
Abbey:
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