SOURCE: Knott, John R. “Edward Abbey and the Romance of Wilderness.¹” Western American Literature 30, no. 4 (winter 1996): 331-51.

In the following essay, Knott examines the tension in Abbey's writing between his efforts to maintain a rational and concrete voice and his romanticism.

At the end of his introduction to The Journey Home, Edward Abbey comments that if he sounds intransigent it is not just because he loves an argument, and likes to provoke people, but because he is an extremist, “one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another” (JH, xiv). The image, drawn from the canyon country Abbey made his own, is a particularly revealing one. Anyone who knows Abbey's writing will recognize one kind of extremism in his assaults on proprieties of any kind he...