Desert Solitaire

Desert Solitaire:
A Season in the Wilderness

First edition cover
Author	Edward Abbey
Illustrator	Peter Parnall
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Autobiography Nature writing
Publisher	McGraw-Hill
Publication date	1968
Media type	Hardcover
Pages	269

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness is an autobiographical work by American writer Edward Abbey, originally published in 1968. His fourth book and his first book-length non-fiction work, it followed three fictional books, Jonathan Troy (1954), The Brave Cowboy (1956), and Fire on the Mountain (1962). Although it initially garnered little attention, Desert Solitaire was eventually recognized as an iconic work of nature writing and a staple of early environmentalist writing, bringing Abbey critical acclaim and popularity as a writer of environmental, political, and philosophical issues.

Based on Abbey's activities as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 1950s, the book is often compared to Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. It is written as a series of vignettes about Abbey's experiences in the Colorado Plateau region of the desert Southwestern United States, ranging from vivid descriptions of the flora, fauna, geology, and human inhabitants of the area, to firsthand accounts of wilderness exploration and river running, to a polemic against development and excessive tourism in the national parks, to stories of the author's work with a search and rescue team to pull a dead body out of the desert. The book is interspersed with observations and discussions about the various tensions – physical, social or existential – between humans and the desert environment. Many of the chapters also engage in lengthy critiques of modern Western civilization, United States politics, and the decline of America's environment. Although written as a memoir, the book also includes partially and fully fictionalized anecdotes.