A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Who was Edward Abbey?

“It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life— that is the deepest personal tragedy.”

— Edward Abbey

Who was Edward Abbey?

Edward Abbey was a firebrand of a writer, a renegade desert rat with an anarchist's heart, a part-time crusader, and a half-hearted fanatic driven by an ancient, rebellious soul. He had an insatiable hunger for pretty women, cheap cigars, and the pure, savage bliss of stomping through untamed landscapes.

His friend and fellow writer, Charles Bowden, once said: “Either people have never heard of him or have read everything he ever wrote.”

Abbey's writing was a blistering love letter to the untamed wild of the American desert. His tirades were as scalding as the sun-baked sandstone—a no-nonsense cry for a reconnection to the land that sustains us.

With the heart of a poet and the pen of an unhinged outlaw, Abbey wanted to burn the world’s apathy to the ground and rebuild it with something wilder, something feral. You feel the heat of his disdain for industrialism throughout his writings, his raging contempt for mindless consumer culture, and his seething ridicule of the sterile, corporatizing of American society.

“Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”

Abbey was a blemished warrior in combat with the mechanized destruction of the earth, a crazed monk of the desert who never wavered from his fervent defense of the chaotic wild and the sovereignty of the individual.

He writes:

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

Before his untimely death at 62, Abbey was the author of numerous books that caused a ruckus. His well-known works are Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel.

The following is Abbey's introduction to his witty book of euphemisms titled: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Vox Clamantis in Deserto: Notes from a Secret Journal.

I hope you enjoy it.