“Desert Solitaire,” published to little promotion and few sales in 1968, told the story of an American wanderer from Appalachian Pennsylvania finding his place in the remaining wild parts of the American West.
The book that was born from those journals, first published 50 years ago by McGraw Hill, made it clear that Edward Abbey preferred the time alone. Sometimes his wife and baby lived there with him. Sometimes he was there alone, living in a little plywood-and-tin housetrailer off a dirt road just north of Balanced Rock. It was an ideal life for a writer who needed the solitude and drama of a wild desert landscape. Maybe nonfiction, maybe some of Abbey’s barroom tales about camping.Ībbey had filled many notebooks during his 1950s summer jobs as the one-and-only on-site ranger at what was then called Arches National Monument, in the canyon country just north of Moab, Utah. His novels weren’t selling, and his agent in New York suggested something different.
He wasn’t there for long.īut in a corner of the saloon attached to the legal brothel at Ash Meadows, just across the Nevada line, the underemployed park ranger and philosopher worked on a new manuscript. Few remembered him, in Shoshone and Furnace Creek. Pushing 40 and owing child support, the wandering philosopher took whatever public-sector job he could get: seasonal park ranger, fire lookout, welfare case worker, school bus driver. Edward Abbey had published a couple of novels to little notice, although his postmodern western “The Brave Cowboy” had been adapted into an interesting black-and-white movie with Kirk Douglas called “Lonely Are the Brave.” He was overqualified, with a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico, and he was broke again. Death Valley High School got a new bus driver in the fall of 1966.
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