DESERT SOLITAIRE. A Season in the Wilderness. With Drawings by Peter Parnall

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. First edition. Hardcover. Nearly fine with minor rubs at corners and light darkening to spine. Peter Parnall. An autobiographical work by American writer Edward Abbey (1927-1989) originally published in 1968. His fourth book and his first book-length non-fiction work, it follows three fictional books (Jonathan Troy, The Brave Cowboy, and Fire on the Mountain). Novelist, essayist, white-water rafter, and self-described "desert rat," Abbey wrote of the wonders and beauty of the American West that was fast disappearing in the name of "development" and "progress." Often angry, frequently funny, and sometimes lyrical, Abbey recreated for his readers a region that was unique in the world. The American West was perhaps the last place where solitary selves could discover and reflect on their connections with wild things and with their fellow human beings. "This is not primarily a book about the desert " writes Edward Abbey in his introduction. "In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. What I have tried to do then is something a bit different. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.".