Excerpt of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors by Laura Miller
(Page 6 of 12)
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Celebrated as a brilliant, sardonic environmental polemicist and chronicler
of the Southwestern landscape, Abbey thought of himself primarily as a
novelist, and during the final decades of his life he nursed grievances
against both critics and admirers who had slighted his achievements as a
fiction writer. He spent much of the 1950s studying philosophy atthe
University of New Mexico, where he wrote a master's thesis on anarchy and
violence. Abbey's literary career began with the execrable bildungsroman Jonathan
Troy, followed by two intermittently successful modern westerns with an
existential bent: The Brave Cowboy (later made into a Kirk Douglas
movie titled Lonely Are the Brave), and Fire on the Mountain.
In 1968, after supporting himself for several years by
working as a seasonal park ranger in Utah, Abbey published the first of his
eleven nonfiction books, the angry, elegiac essay Desert Solitaire; it
remains his most popular title and is justly considered a classic of American
writing on the meaning and value of wilderness. His fourth novel, Black Sun,
tells the story of a man whose lover disappears after they spend an ecstatic
period together at a fire-lookout tower in Grand Canyon country; the book
includes some of Abbey's finest evocations of the alien beauty of the desert
and some of his most bathetic musings on love and solitude. Abbey's best novel
by far is The Monkey Wrench Gang, a hugely entertaining comic fantasy
about a quartet of eco-saboteurs who roam the Southwest destroying roads,
billboards, bridges, and bulldozers, and who dream of demolishing the West's
greatest symbol of technocratic hubris, Glen Canyon Dam.
So compelling is Abbey's anarchistic vision that it was
instrumental in inspiring the formation of Earth First!—an organization
whose more zealous and naive members sometimes attempted to emulate the
demolition tactics of the novel's protaganists. The Monkey Wrench Gang
draws its satirical force from both a gleeful countercultural violation of
middle-class norms (its Vietnam vet George Washington Hayduke, "a
saboteur of much wrath but little brain," could have come straight from
the pages of the underground comix) and a Twainian, mock-heroic exuberance. Good
News, Abbey's next novel, is a scabrous but ultimately slight exposition
of a post-apocalyptic Arizona in which Abbey's worst ecological nightmares
have come to pass. The author's most ambitious and explicitly autobiographical
novel is The Fool's Progress; despite some fine passages of
reminiscence about Appalachian boyhood on a Depression-era farm, the book is a
showcase of many of Abbey's least attractive qualities (among them his willful
cantankerousness, xenophobia, and self-pitying machismo). A posthumous sequel
to The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives!, was published in 1990.
See Also: Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, which includes
All the Pretty Horses, portrays a Southwest very different from Edward
Abbey's, but it is similarly transcendent and haunted by the loss of its
pristine perfection. The novels of Carl Hiassen transplant the theme of
violent, comic revenge against rapacious development to the wilds of South
Florida. Barbara Kingsolver offers a feminized version of Abbey country in her
novel Animal Dreams.
—Hal Espen
Achebe, Chinua 1930- b. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in 0gidi, Nigeria
FICTION: Things Fall Apart (1958), No
Longer At Ease (1960), The Sacrificial Egg (stories, 1962), Arrow of God
(1964), A Man of the People (1966), Girls At War (stories, 1972), Anthills of
the Savannah (1987)
NONFICTION: Morning Yet on Creation
Day (essays, 1975), The Trouble With Nigeria (essays, 1983), Hopes and
Impediments (essays, 1988), Another Africa (essay and poems with photographs
by Robert Lyons, 1998)
Reproduced with the
permission of the publisher, Viking Penguin. No part of this book may be
reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
