Edward Abbey: Critic and Crusader

[s~Z]

Twenty-five years after its initial publication, some 700,000 paperback
copies of "The Monkey Wrench Gang" have been sold, even though Abbey made
The New Yorker and Paris Review crowds uncomfortable. He called the revered
Tom Wolfe a "faggoty fascist fop" and the sainted John Updike a boring
armchair purveyor of "suburban soap operas," yet his die-hard fans included
such well-known writers as Joan Didion, Wendell Berry, Thomas Pynchon,
Cormac McCarthy, Dillard, Hunter S. Thompson, McMurtry and Thomas McGuane.
The late Wallace Stegner, in fact, proclaimed that Abbey presented the
"stinger of a scorpion" and was the "most effective publicist of the West's
curious desire to rape itself since Bernard DeVoto."

--Douglas Brinkley in
http://www.calendarlive.com/calendarlive/books/lat_0123brinkley.htm