Edward Abbey

Born to an organist mother who taught him to love art and an anarchist father who taught him to be skeptical of the government, Edward Abbey took to literature and politics at a very young age. Honorably discharged from a clerk position in the military—a distinction he rejected—Abbey studied the use of violence in political rebellion and openly espoused anarchy in his published essays. Thanks to these interests, the FBI opened a file on him; “I’d be insulted if they weren’t watching me,” Abbey later bragged. His early love of nature—cultivated in hitchhiking trips throughout the American West—brought him at age 29 to Arches National Monument, near Moab, Utah, for a summer park ranger job. Here, he kept notebooks that he would later turn into his politically charged memoir, Desert Solitaire (1968). Though several of Abbey’s novels became Hollywood films, this memoir, coinciding with the 1960s environmentalist movement, became his first real bestseller. He furthered that book’s harsh political rhetoric in The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), a novel that later inspired the real-life eco-terrorist group Earth First!. Abbey continued to publish environmentalist novels, memoirs, and political commentary until he died at age 62. For these two influential works, and for his angry presence as a public figure, Abbey is regarded is an essential figure in the environmentalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s.