The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel

by Edward Abbey

Overview

The Fool's Progress, the "fat masterpiece" as Edward Abbey labeled it, is his most important piece of writing: it reveals the complete Ed Abbey, from the green grass of his memory as a child in Appalachia to his approaching death in Tuscon at age sixty two.

When his third wife abandons him in Tucson, boozing, misanthropic anarchist Henry Holyoak Lightcap shoots his refrigerator and sets off in a battered pick-up truck for his ancestral home in West Virginia. Accompanied only by his dying dog and his memories, the irascible warhorse (a stand-in for the "real" Abbey) begins a bizarre cross-country odyssey—determined to make peace with his past—and to wage one last war against the ravages of "progress."

"A profane, wildly funny, brash, overbearing, exquisite tour de force." — The Chicago Tribune

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805057911
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/15/1998
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	787,448
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.17(d)

About the Author

The author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang is unchallenged among radicals of all ages. Edward Abbey, an American icon, called "the original fly in the ointment" by Tom McGuane, today has roads and a town named after him.

Editorial Reviews

Praise the earth for Edward Abbey.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Abbey can attain a kind of glory in his writing. He takes scenes that have been well-traveled by other writers and recreates them as traditional American myth.” —The New York Times Book Review

“We are living...among punishments and ruins. For those who know this, Edward Abbey's books remain an indispensable solace.” —Wendell Berry

“He is the voice of all that is ornery and honorable.” —Alice Hoffman

From the Publisher

In a wild, picaresque novel, nature-loving Henry Lightcap makes a despairing odyssey across a lovely but ruined land from Tucson, Ariz., to the Appalachian family farm run by his brother; penniless, Henry has nowhere else to go.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Long a rabid defender of the wilderness, a man who has taken an almost anarchic view of the concept of individual freedom, Abbey offers his first fiction in 12 years. The story of a man's journey home (both literally and figuratively), this work is a bitterly humorous commentary on the foibles of modern society and its impact on nature. Government officials, tourists, developers, hippies, Mexicans, Indians -- all feel his wrath. For all its surface crudity and earthiness, this novel is full of passion and pathos; Henry Lightcap's lifelong struggle to maintain his individuality and more immediate struggle to complete his journey from Tucson to Stump Creek, West Virginia, assume almost heroic proportions. A powerful, often hauntingly beautiful novel. -- .David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.

Library Journal