Edward Abbey Biography
Life - Death - Praise - Genealogy data

"FAMOUS STAR EDWARD ABBEY
Edward Abbey is a writer. He writes about how to blowup dams. The name of one of the books he wrote was called Monkey wrench gang. He wears a black hat with a wrench on it. Ed has a gray elephant beard and he's a tall, skinny man. Ed does not like the highway so he throws beer bottles out the window. Ed does not like t.v. so the took his t.v. outside and took his gun and shot his t.v. and now it's a sculpture in his backyard." -- grade-school composition by Brady Barnes

"Edward Abbey is one of our foremost Western essayist and novelists. A militant conservationist, he has attracted a large following -- not only within the ranks of Sierra Club enthusiasts and dedicated backpackers, but also among armchair appreciators of good writing. What always made his work doubly interesting is the sense of a true maverick spirit at large, within it -- a kind of spirit not imitable, limited only to the highest class of literary outlaws" -- The Denver Post

"Abbey is a fresh breath from the farther reaches and canyons of the diminishing frontier" -- Houston Chronicle

"Abbey clearly has a high-octane mind, and the combination of that mind and that heart and that spleen make for lively prose and much wry, profane humor" -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"Abbey's the original fly in the ointment. Give him money and prizes. Don't let anything happen to him" -- Thomas McGuane

"One of the very best writers to deal with the American west" -- The Washington Post

"Edward Abbey is a writer one would not want to miss" -- The Washington Post

"The man, quite simply, is a master" -- The Bloomsbury Review

"He is a national treasure" -- The Bloomsbury Review

"Abbey can attain a kind of glory in his writing. He takes scenes that have been well-traveled by other writers, and re-creates them as traditional American myths" -- The New York Times Book Review

"I've been along a few of Mr. Abbey's roads. He sees much more than I did. Indeed, reading him is often better than being there was" -- John Leonard

"Among the things to give thanks for is Edward Abbey" -- Los Angeles Times

"We are living ... among punishments and ruins. For those who knows this, Edward Abbey's books remain an indispensable solace. His essays, and his novels, too, are 'antidotes to despair' -- Wendell Berry

"What entertains many and exasperates others is Abbey's unique prose voice. Alternately misantrophic and sentimental, enraged and hilarious, it is the voice of a full-blooded man airing his passions" -- Peter Carlson, People magazine

"Abbey is a gadfly with a stinger like a scorpion, the most effective publicist of the West's curious desire to rape itself since Bernard DeVito" -- Wallace Stegner

"A record as important and lovely as Muir's or Thoreau's" -- William McKibben, New York Post

"Edward Abbey is arrogant, self-centered and bigoted, which often shows through in his pull-no-punches writing. He also happens to be one of the most sensitive writers around, and one of the few able to portray the wilderness and the importance of wilderness in the human psyche" -- John Harlin, Outside

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