SOURCE: Metting, Fred. “Edward Abbey's Unique Road.” South Dakota Review 34, no. 1 (spring 1996): 85-102.

In the following essay, Metting examines the ways in which Abbey differs from earlier generations of American nature writers.

On the title page of Edward Abbey's 1979 collection of essays Abbey's Road there is a drawing of a street sign for Abbey's Road with the command to the reader to “take the other.” Edward Abbey does indeed travel his desired solitary road in American nature writing. In both his nonfiction and his fiction he breaks cleanly from the strong, 150 year-old legacy of the American transcendentalists and their approach to nature. In addition, Abbey formulates a unique and radical rationale for wilderness preservation which differs from earlier calls for conservation in our nature writing. Abbey's personal history essays, his novels, and his recently published journals reveal his iconoclastic stance on both nature's reality and wilderness preservation as...