Fool's Progress

Synopsis

Ornery and unpredictable, Edward Abbey was an autobiographer, writes the farmer-poet Wendell Berry, speaking as and for himself, fighting, literally, for dear life. And this novel, the fat masterpiece, as Ed labeled it, was 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 Tucson at age sixty-two. Funny and ribald, it offers what Larry McMurtry has called Abbey's fine particularity, the authority of a writer who feels a lot and then manages to transcend his own notions of himself.