Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

And write letters Edward Abbey—“the Thoreau of the American West” (Washington Post)—did. At once incendiary and insightful, cantankerous and profoundly perceptive, Abbey was a singular American writer and cult hero, as famous for books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang as he was infamous for the persona of “Cactus Ed.” A true iconoclast with a rich sense of humor, his polemics and salvos—Wallace Stegner on...