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Unit 10: The Right to Arms by Edward Abbey

the New York area, where Abbey held various jobs (he was a technical writer, factory employee, Notes
and at one point a welfare caseworker) and Albuquerque, where he received a master’s degree
in philosophy at the University of New Mexico in 1959. His thesis was entitled Anarchism and
the Morality of Violence . Around that time, Abbey and some like-minded friends began to
commit occasional acts of sabotage against development projects in the West—they would, for
example, pour sugar syrup into the oil tanks of construction equipment, thus putting it out of
commission. He continued to write fiction; his third novel, Fire on the Mountain, was drawn
on the real-life story of a rancher who refused to turn over land to the government for a
missile test site.
In 1965 Abbey’s marriage to Deanin, long on the rocks, came to an end. Close to 40 years old,
with few stable employment prospects, he seemed to have hit a career stall. But with the
publication of Desert Solitaire in 1968 (by the McGraw-Hill house) his fortune as a writer
turned around for good. Abbey alternated chapters on parks development and on such topics
as water in the Western ecosystem with grand philosophical themes, and the mixture caught
on among young readers in whom an environmental consciousness was just beginning to
awaken. The book was reprinted well over a dozen times, and by the mid-1970s Abbey was
able to augment his income from his books and his park ranger work with writing professorships
at several schools. Chief among these was the University of Arizona, which provided Abbey
with a base for his work in his later years.

Inspired Radical Environmentalists

Always productive as a writer, Abbey was distracted from his work by the death of his third
wife, Judith Pepper, from leukemia in 1970. With Pepper Abbey had a third child, Susannah.
A fourth marriage, to Renee Dowling, lasted from 1974 to 1980, and a fifth, to Clarke Cartwright,
began in 1982 and endured for the rest of Abbey’s life. Two more children, Rebecca and
Benjamin, were born to Abbey and Cartwright. Abbey published a novel, Black Sun , in 1971,
and he furnished text for several large-format books of Southwest photographs, including the
Time-Life series volume Cactus Country in 1973. His most important book of the 1970s, however,
was 1975’s The Monkey Wrench Gang , a comic novel drawing on Abbey’s development-sabotage
activities. Not strongly promoted by its publisher, Lippincott, the book was reported to have
sold 500,000 copies thanks mostly to word-of-mouth publicity. The activities of the loosely
knit Earth First! group were sometimes modelled on those in Abbey’s novel, and the term
“monkeywrenching” entered the vocabulary of radical environmentalism.
Abbey discouraged violence and remained ambivalent about the more radical applications of
his ideas. He characterized The Monkey Wrench Gang as something of a rant, inspired by anger
over such events as the inundation of a spectacular stretch of Colorado River scenery after the
river was impounded by the Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s. Abbey was never afraid to stir
controversy, however, and he alienated some of his allies within the environmental movement
with various positions he took in the 1970s and 1980s. He advocated closing the U.S.-Mexican
border to Mexican immigration, for example. And he was unsympathetic to the feminist movement;
critics complained that the female characters in some of his novels were little more than thin
stereotypes. In the West, Abbey had admirers and detractors on all points of the political
spectrum. He was defended by fellow anti-development activist Wendell Berry in an influential
1985 essay entitled “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey.” Arguing that Abbey had never
claimed the environmentalist mantle, Berry asked, “If Mr. Abbey is not an environmentalist,
what is he? He is, I think, at least in the essays, an autobiographer.” Indeed, Abbey’s larger-
than-life personality showed through in everything he wrote, whether fiction, non-fiction, or
the poetry that was published at the end of his life.

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