Perhaps because of his radicalism (which might be suspected of not being ambiguous enough to qualify as truly literary), some find his cult of personality to be distasteful. Kerouac is denigrated because of his association with intellectually un-serious young wanderers.

(A case in point: this article was initially supposed to be about Kerouac, an idea that was quickly-and unsurprisingly-nixed by a certain elitist New York editor.) In fact, Abbey was partway through a first draft of a beatnik road novel when On the Road was released and felt scooped by Kerouac. While Kerouac’s reaction is one of sadness, Abbey’s is anger. Though they are worlds apart stylistically, both novelists wrote constantly and movingly of the feeling of lostness permeating post-war America. Unlike his contemporary Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road turned fifty this August, Abbey gets very little attention or respect from the literary mainstream. Abbey wrote five novels of ideas, all of which romp along the edge of the civilized world. He viewed the central dilemma of modern society as the conflict of “humans versus human institutions,” a subtle dialectic well-suited to fiction. ” Those ellipses, and the story to which they belong, encompass much of the philosophy of Edward Abbey, the cantankerous, contrarian anarchist-a redneck with a PhD in philosophy and a penchant for classical music-who famously called economic growth for its own sake the “ideology of the cancer cell.” Though he is best known for his incisive essays and powerful literary persona, Abbey considered himself a novelist first and foremost. A cowboy hero, lost in the modern world of the 1950s, turns outlaw and escapes a massive, high-tech posse only to be flattened by a tractor trailer hauling toilets, emblazoned with the nihilistic slogan “America Builds For.

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