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"This is the most beautiful place
on earth."
Cover Text
Edward Abbey's account of two summers spent in southeastern Utah's canyonlands is
one of the most enduring works of contemporary American nature writing. In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the
publication of Desert Solitaire, the University of Arizona Press is pleased to make the book available once again in
a hardcover edition, featuring a new introduction by the author, his definitive corrections to the text, and eighteen illustrations
commissioned exclusively for this volume.
"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 and eventually developed a loyal following in paperback
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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 May 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."
From http://www.abbeyweb.net/books/ea/desert_solitaire.html
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