Page 129 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Elective English–II

Notes This perception changed in 1944, for that summer, between his junior and senior years at
Indiana High School, Abbey lived out a dream held by many young people: he took off from
home and travelled around the country, relying mostly on hitchhiking and freight trains for
transportation. The trip, described in an essay called “Hallelujah on the Bum” included in
Abbey’s book The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West , took him through
Chicago and Yellowstone National Park to Seattle, San Francisco, and the desert Southwest in
the middle of summer. He had all his possessions and money stolen by one driver who gave
him a ride, and in Flagstaff, Arizona, he spent a night on the floor of a jail cell with a group
of drunks after being arrested for vagrancy. He also fell in love with the West. “I became a
Westerner at the age of 17, in the summer of 1944, while hitchhiking around the USA,” Abbey
later wrote (as quoted by biographer James Cahalan). “For me it was love at first sight—a total
passion which has never left me.” And he began to write about that passion in articles published
in his high school newspaper, the High Arrow.

For the next several years, Abbey’s life resembled those of many other young American men.
Drafted into the U.S. Army in the summer of 1945 after graduating from high school, he was
sent to Italy and served as a clerk and military motorcycle police officer. Honorably discharged
in 1947, he used the stipends he received as a result of the socalled G.I. Bill (Servicemen’s
Readjustment Act) to attend college, first at Indiana University in Pennsylvania, and then at
the University of New Mexico, where he graduated with a philosophy degree in 1951. He
married a college sweetheart, Jean Schmechel, in 1950.

Published First Novel

Underneath these activities, however, brewed various ideas of a nonconformist cast. As an
undergraduate, he had already run into trouble when he adorned the cover of a student
literary journal with a controversial quotation ascribed to the 18th-century French philosopher
Denis Diderot—”Mankind will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails
of the last priest”—and then compounded the insult by attributing the line to Little Women
author Louisa May Alcott. Abbey found himself drawn toward creative writing. In 1954 he
finished a novel, Jonathan Troy . He later disparaged the work, which drew heavily on the
locale of his Pennsylvania boyhood, but the book landed with a major publisher (Dodd, Mead)
and successfully launched his long literary career. Later critics found much to admire in this
early effort, and in 1956 Abbey found a ready market for his second novel, The Brave Cowboy:
An Old Tale in a New Time . The book, which dealt with the doomed heroics of an old-time
cowboy in the modern world, was adapted to screen in the 1962 film Lonely Are the Brave with
actor Kirk Douglas in the lead role of Jack Burns. Douglas insisted on making the film over
studio objections.

Abbey also took steps that brought him closer to the desert he loved. For many years between
1956 and 1971 he took temporary jobs with the U.S. National Park Service as a ranger and fire
lookout. For his first two summers he worked at Utah’s Arches National Monument (later
Arches National Park). A compulsive journal-keeper by this time, he wrote voluminously
about the awe-inspiring rock formations that gave the park its name, about the ecology of the
area, and about the future Abbey saw coming—a future in which fragile natural areas would
be overrun with hordes of tourist automobiles. Abbey’s journals later became the basis for one
of his most celebrated books, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness.
For much of the 1950s and 1960s, Abbey’s life was restless. His first marriage quickly ended
in divorce, but in 1952 he married New York-born New Mexico art student Rita Deanin, and
the couple had two sons. Abbey enrolled in a master’s program in philosophy at Yale University
in 1953 but hated his symbolic logic class and left. The family bounced back and forth between

124 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY