The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton Book

I have been fascinated by Cactus Ed since reading "Desert Solitaire" for an Environmental Ethics class in college. The only other book by Abbey that I've read is "The Monkey Wrench Gang," so I didn't know a whole lot about the man before reading this book. The only thing I was clear on was his overall views on the environment and mankind's encroachment on untouched and supposedly protected lands in the U.S. After reading this collection of letters, I now know a whole lot more about the man. The man had more layers than an onion. While many of his opinions I agree with, there were a few ideas that surprised me. I'm actually pleased at this. I like the idea that someone I admire held some ideas and opinions that I disagree with. It brings new interest to his writings.

The book opens with a letter Abbey wrote to his parents while in college. He humorously asked for money and was rather candid about his extra curricular activities. Yet his philosophical references gave away that he was actually studying. A hilarious letter to open the book with! The collection spans from his college days to the last month of his life, March 1989. It includes personal correspondence to family and friends, correspondence (both personal and professional) to colleagues, fellow writers, editors, publishers, etc., and quite a few complaint letters to book reviewers as well as a large number of letters to the editors of various newspapers and magazines. These last type of letters usually espoused Abbey's opinion on various hot button topics of the day. Many of these topics are still major points of contention in our society decades after Abbey argued about them. And oh boy was Abbey argumentative. He was also witty as hell. If Abbey were alive today, I'm sure he'd be making headlines with controversial and irreverent Twitter posts. I have yet to join Twitter myself, but if Cactus Ed were tweeting, I'd be following him for sure. I found myself reading this book with a pencil, underlining one liners and passages that I wanted to remember, quote and/or come back to later. I also found the personal insights into the publishing and writing business particularly interesting. Some may find the letters regarding business details of getting a book out to print mundane or boring. As a would-be-writer, I found these glimpses into the business fascinating.

My only complaint is in regards to the formatting. The editor chose to use end notes, rather than footnotes. I found this distracting. I would have much preferred footnotes on the bottom of the page so that I did not have to constantly flip to the end of the book to see who the recipient of the letter was or the explanation to some random reference in a letter. This disrupted the flow of reading for me. However, even that is not enough of a complaint for me to take away a star from the Goodreads rating.

Clearly Abbey was taken well before he was done. In letters from 1988, he referred often to future dates, like when he promised Robert Redford an advance copy of his last novel when it was published in 1990. It's such a shame Abbey died before he could finish what he started, both personally and professionally. After finishing this book, I'm inclined to explore more of his work. I want to read more of his fiction, nonfiction, and especially the posthumously published journal entries. I'm currently interested in desert writing, which is an underrepresented genre. Edward Abbey is definitely the perfect example of someone with great talent, writing about a region of this country he loved more than the one he was born in. It is clear that the editor was a close friend of Abbey's by the loving and careful way the letters are presented, by the concise introductions to each year of correspondence, and by the careful explanations in the endnotes.