A memoir about the book, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey
- Mark Mathew Braunstein
- Jun 8, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 27
Unlike all my previous blog postings, this is not a book review. This is an homage to Edward Abbey and a memoir of my discovery of Desert Solitaire.
The year was 1985. Before camping out in Big Bend National Park in Texas, my brother and I checked reported to the Park Headquarters and Visitor Center to pick up our backcountry camping permits. At the Visitor Center, a bookshop sold books and guidebooks about that region’s deserts and mountains. One title caught my eye. Desert Solitaire.
I removed it from the shelf to browse through it. Call it, Love at First Read. Note to self: I must read this book! Yet, needing to travel light for my return flight home, I did not buy it. Instead, I would track it down when I returned home.
Home in Providence, RI, I ventured to the College Hill Bookstore in the heart of the shopping district that caters to the students of Brown University and of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Until my discovery at Big Bend, the author was unknown to me, so I assumed that I would need to place a special order for this obscure author’s book. Delightfully wrong! The book was in stock. I purchased it and read it almost immediately. Since then, I have read almost the entire oeuvre of Edward Abbey. As an acolyte of Abbey, I have read Desert Solitaire three times, my third time chapter-by-chapter backwards. Because, according to Kierkegaard, life is lived forwards but understood backwards.
I love Edward Abbey. I mean, his writings, not the man. I think everyone would like a Van Gogh painting hanging in their living room, but few would welcome the paint-spattered Vincent himself sitting in their living room. I likely feel the same about Abbey. It is difficult to separate the man from his writings, including from the always-male protagonists portrayed in his novels, most of them demi-hemi-semi-autobiographical about a self-absorbed, self-pitying, hot-tempered, gunslinging, cigar-smoking, booze-guzzling, pain-pill-popping, grease-slurping, carnivorous, narcissistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, womanizing macho male obsessed over the prowess of his penis. I leave to biographers and psychoanalysts to sort out within this author/character dichotomy which of these aforementioned shortcomings are equally suggestive of Edward Abbey. Perhaps Abbey had merely playacted the role of bad boy. Regardless, I forgive both the author and his main characters their human foibles because both of them seem to be wise men who have practiced the fine art of self-awareness with a healthy dose of self-deprecation.
Desert Solitaire is nonfiction. When I first read the final pages of his penultimate novel, The Fool’s Progress, I broke down in tears. I mourned because of the book’s doleful conclusion where the protagonist dies and ascends somewhere akin to Heaven, though only in the hallucinatory imagination of a delirious dying man. Also, I cried tears of joy in retrospective awe of the entire book’s profundity and immense beauty that I held in my hands and had just witnessed with my eyes.
Same as my having read Desert Solitaire three times, I eventually read The Fool’s Progress, too, three times, again my third time chapter-by-chapter backwards. Upon my second reading, I again shed tears of joy, so my weeping might serve as a measure of the novel’s endurance. I mourned not because I did not want its fictitious hero to die, but because I did not want the book to end.
After first reading Fool’s Progress soon after its 1988 publication, I wrote Edward Abbey a fan letter, which during those primordial days before an internet meant a handwritten postal letter. I expressed to him my admiration of his writings and that I hoped he was not dying of a terminal illness as was his alter ego in the novel. Selfishly, I wanted him to continue to live so that he could continue to write so that I could continue to read.
Abbey replied cordially with a handwritten postcard postmarked February 3, 1989. Five weeks later, on March 14, 1989, Abbey died of a terminal illness.
