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Edward Abbey was one of the most important and most explicitly political American nature writers of the second half of the twentieth century. He, however, disliked the phrase "nature writing"; he preferred to think of himself as a novelist who wrote nonfiction pieces--which he termed "personal histories"--on the side. Few people have written with so much affection for freedom and wilderness, especially as represented by the desert Southwest, and with so much anger for the forces working against freedom and wilderness. Larry McMurtry, as quoted from the cover of Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (1984), has called Abbey "the Thoreau of the American West," and in many ways the title suits Abbey well. He was, similar to Henry David Thoreau, a superb prose stylist and a user of wit to question and counter ready-made ways of thinking. Both Thoreau and Abbey were individualists to the core, and Abbey shared Thoreau's great reverence for wilderness as humankind's ancestral home, the sole source of hope for freedom and humanity--a hope that, as Abbey was in more of an historical position to realize, is swiftly being taken away.
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