"Edward Abbey (1927-1989) was a singular American writer and cult hero, as famous for books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang as he was infamous for the prickly persona of "Cactus Ed." Abbey's postcards and letters, legendary during his lifetime and collected here for the first time, convey the fullness of the man and reveal, along with his wisdom and savage wit, a tender side seldom seen before. Whether spouting on the virtues of anger, roasting hawkish proponents of Vietnam, or lending encouragement to fellow writers such as Cormac McCarthy, here we find the essential spirit of the man, intimate and revolutionary."--BOOK JACKET.

Issue contains a review of Edward Abbey's book "Postcards from Ed : Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast" by Ken Wright.

More than twenty-five years after his death, iconic writer and nature activist Edward Abbey (1927-1989) remains an influential presence in the American environmental movement. Abbey's best known works continue to be widely read and inspire discourse on the key issues facing contemporary American society, particularly with respect to urbanization and technology. Abbey in America, published forty years after Abbey's popular novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, features an all-star list of contributors, including journalists, authors, scholars, and two of Abbey's best friends as they explore Abbey's ideas and legacy through their unique literary, personal, and scholarly perspectives.

This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

Hope is an interesting thing. Some think it’s foolish, often misplaced, and at rarer times devastating; but more agree that hope is an integral and beautiful part of life, something that implicitly makes us human. We’re always hoping for something—for change, for improvement, or to find peace of mind amid life’s bustling demands. These things are often the subjects of our deepest desires, those things that can bring us true happiness. Fortunately for all of us who count ourselves among the hopeful, there has been plenty of wisdom bestowed from some of the greatest minds and noteworthy individuals throughout history, including: Albert Einstein Albert Camus Barack Obama Benjamin Franklin John Lennon George Bernard Shaw Abraham Lincoln And many others! The Little Red Book of Hope is an inspired collection of uplifting thoughts about what it is that allows us to persevere; about the primacy of the human spirit, and ultimately, about the redemptive power and vitality of hope.

An homage to the West and to two great writers who set the standard for all who celebrate and defend it. Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West. These two great westerners had very different ideas about what it meant to love the land and try to care for it, and they did so in distinctly different styles. Boozy, lustful, and irascible, Abbey was best known as the author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (and also of the classic nature memoir Desert Solitaire), famous for spawning the idea of guerrilla actions—known to admirers as "monkeywrenching" and to law enforcement as domestic terrorism—to disrupt commercial exploitation of western lands. By contrast, Stegner, a buttoned-down, disciplined, faithful family man and devoted professor of creative writing, dedicated himself to working through the system to protect western sites such as Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. In a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling, and by an ever-growing population that seems to be in the process of loving the West to death, Gessner asks: how might these two farseeing environmental thinkers have responded to the crisis? Gessner takes us on an inspiring, entertaining journey as he renews his own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild, confronting American overconsumption, and fighting environmental injustice—all while reawakening the thrill of the words of his two great heroes.