What a bright, bold, and enlightening book David Gessner has written about the American West with its monumental mysteries! He focuses on two extraordinary writers who together give us diverse ways of seeing and believing in the land and its wildness and vulnerability. This book is at once a memoir, a travelogue, a piece of cultural criticism, and a pilgrimage that uses the books of Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner as guides to this region of the country.
The two writers could not been more different in style, demeanor, or character. Wallace Stegner was a writer and professor who took great pleasure in working around the clock. Writing novels was fulfilling but so was devoting himself to environmental activism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1971 novel Angle of Repose and encouraged such writers as Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, and others through Stanford's Creative Writing Program which he founded in 1946.
Edward Abbey was a legendary wild and crazy guy who enjoyed shaking things up wherever he went. This radical environmentalist is best remembered by his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang and his autobiographical Desert Solitaire. In the latter, Abbey proves that his prose can inspire others and soar:
"No longer do I feel so isolated from this sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us, Long live diversity, long live the earth!"
