SOURCE: Scheese, Don. “Desert Solitaire: Counter-Friction to the Machine in the Garden.” North Dakota Quarterly 59, no. 2 (spring 1991): 211-27.

In the following essay, Scheese identifies Abbey primarily as a cultural and social critic in the same vein as Henry David Thoreau.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

—Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government”

I first encountered the work of Edward Abbey during a cross-continental train trip in December 1977. To help me endure the wintry, interminable monotones of the Great Plains, a friend suggested a few books to take along. I can recall but one of them now: Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book,” Thoreau wrote in Walden (107). After reading Desert Solitaire a new era began in my life: I made it my vocation both to study the...