Editing Desert Solitaire (section)

==Background==
In 1956 and 1957, Edward Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger for the United States [[National Park Service]] at [[Arches National Park|Arches National Monument]], near the town of [[Moab, Utah]]. Abbey held the position from April to September each year, during which time he maintained trails, greeted visitors, and collected campground fees. He lived in a house trailer provided to him by the Park Service, as well as in a [[Ramada (shelter)|ramada]] that he built himself. The area around Moab in that period was still a wilderness habitat and largely undeveloped, with only small numbers of park visitors and limited access to most areas of the monument.{{sfn|Scheese|p=305}}

During his stay at Arches, Abbey accumulated a large volume of notes and sketches which later formed the basis of his first non-fiction work, ''Desert Solitaire''. These notes remained unpublished for almost a decade while Abbey pursued other jobs and attempted with only moderate success to pursue other writing projects, including three novels which proved to be commercial and critical failures. Eventually Abbey revisited the Arches notes and diaries in 1967, and after some editing and revising had them published as a book in 1968.{{sfn|Abbey 1979|pp=vii–xxi}}

Although Abbey rejected the label of [[nature writing]] to describe his work, ''Desert Solitaire'' was one of a number of influential works which contributed to the popularity and interest in the nature writing genre in the 1960s and 1970s. He cited as inspiration and referred to other earlier writers of the genre, particularly [[Mary Hunter Austin]], [[Henry David Thoreau]], and [[Walt Whitman]], whose style Abbey echoed in the structure of his work.{{sfn|Scheese|p=107}} However, Abbey's writing in this period was also significantly more confrontational and politically charged than in earlier works, and like contemporary [[Rachel Carson]] in ''[[Silent Spring]]'', he sought to contribute to the wider political movement of [[environmentalism]] which was emerging at the time. Abbey went on to admire the nature writing and environmentalist contemporaries of that period, particularly [[Annie Dillard]].{{sfn|Pozza|pp=10–12}}