In this book, editors James R. Hepworth and Gregory McNamee have gathered together tributes by 37 friends, students, and colleagues of the writer who during his lifetime was dubbed "the Thoreau of the American West." Ed Abbey was an environmental activist ("Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul"), an enemy of progress ("Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell"), and an anarchist whose writing was an act of conscience ("It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless"). Stirring essays by Wendell Berry, Edward Hoagland, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and others shed light on this fierce defender of the natural world, wilderness, and mystery. "Resist Much, Obey Little," a credo espoused by Walt Whitman, fits Ed Abbey well.