The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader - Hardcover

Edward Abbey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805031324 ISBN 13: 9780805031324

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1995

Synopsis

Collects the best and most inflammatory writings of the late naturalist, environmentalist, and libertarian, a former National Park ranger and the author of Desert Solitaire, The Journey Home, and other works. 12,500 first printing. $10,000 ad/promo.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

From boyhood in Home, Pennsylvania, to his death in Tucson, Arizona, in 1989, this book offers - in Abbey's own words - the world of an American original. Whether writing fact or fiction, Abbey was always an autobiographer. Each of the thirty-five selections presented here, arranged chronologically by date of incident (not of publication), demonstrates that Abbey was passionately, insistently his own man. As poet-farmer Wendell Berry puts it: "He remains Edward Abbey, speaking as and for himself, fighting, literally, for dear life ... for the survival not only of nature, but of human nature, of culture, as only our heritage of works and hopes can define it". To speak for the voiceless was his mission. He was a virtuoso of the well-phrased thought in which style and content, symbol and meaning - each imbued with humor - come together to defy the powerful, reminding us always that preservation of wild nature is a key to a free spirit. And along with Emerson and Thoreau, Abbey, the uncompromising stylist, knew that the corruption of language follows the corruption of man. "Language", Abbey wrote, "seeks to transcend itself, 'to grasp the thing that has no name.'"

About the Author:

Edward Abbey was born in 1927 in Pennsylvania. He earned graduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of New Mexico. He wrote Desert Solitaire while working as a Park Ranger in Utah. He is also the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road, and The Journey Home, among others. He died in March 1989.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0805031324
• ISBN 13: 9780805031324
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: John Macrae