Description

ABBEY’S MONKEY WRENCH GANG, INSCRIBED IN THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION

ABBEY, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Philadelphia and New York, 1975. Octavo, original half red cloth, dust jacket.

First edition, inscribed in red ink on the front free endpaper, “to Renée Hampton from Ed Abbey, Moab ‘75.”

To novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle, Edward Abbey was “one of our great literary provocateurs… He wrote with the cranky forthrightness of his literary heroes, Thoreau and Whitman, defending the rights of the rugged individualist… [and] preserving the wilderness from exploitation.” Naturalist Edward Way Teale described Abbey as an “eloquent loner… a voice crying in the wilderness, for the wilderness” (New York Times). It was while serving as park ranger in the southwest that Abbey’s environmentalist philosophy first burgeoned. His two seminal works, Desert Solitaire and “The Monkey Wrench Gang, which recounts the exploits of a band of guerilla environmentalists, became virtual handbooks of the environmental movement. The strain of cynicism that runs through much of Abbey’s writings is leavened by a bracing prose style and mischievous wit” (Encyclopedia of Literature, 1). An exceptionally fine inscribed copy.