Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (signed association copy)

Abbey, Edward [Ron Kezar]

ISBN 10: 0816510571 / ISBN 13: 9780816510573

Published by University of Arizona, Tucson, 1988

About this Item

The 20th anniversary edition with an excellent association, inscribed in the year of publication in a purple pen on the front free endpaper to a co-founder of Earth First!: "To Ron [Kezar], an EF! leader, -- with admiration and affection, from his friend, Ed Abbey, Tucson, Arizona, August 5 1988." Also signed in full by Abbey--upside down--on the rear free endpaper. Ron Kezar was a former park ranger who later sometimes used the alias Bill Haywood (as in the byline ofEcodefence: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching). Inspired by Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and especially Abbey and hisThe Monkey Wrench Gang, Kezar, Dave Foreman, and three others came up withEF!in 1980 while on a trip to bag a New Mexico peak. Kezar and Foreman were housemates at the time.EF!promoted pushing past the usual lobbying and into "demonstrations" and "confrontations," and one of their famous first acts was unfurling an enormous dark banner that looked like a crack down the Glen Canyon Dam. A terrific association in light of the pivotal role Abbey's writing played in the formation of Earth First! A very near fine book in white cloth boards with only a little rubbing to lower board edges; otherwise fine. In a near fine jacket with subtle sunning to spine affecting the red border of the jacket's edges.

Seller Inventory # 1316

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (signed association copy)
• Publisher: University of Arizona, Tucson
• Publication Date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816510571
• ISBN 13: 9780816510573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First thus.
• Condition: Near fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • The American West
  • Association Copies
  • Interior West
  • Wilderness

About this title

Synopsis

At last, one of the most popular books on the American West is available once again in hardcover. In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Desert Solitaire, the University of Arizona Press is pleased to publish a new edition featuring a new introduction by the author, his definitive corrections to the text, and new illustrations commissioned exclusively for this volume.

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."

About the Author

Edward Abbey worked for sixteen years as a ranger with the National Park Service and National Forest Service, and is the author of Black Sun, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Fool's Progress, and more than a dozen other books. He died in 1989.