Fire on the Mountain

Edward Abbey

Avon Books, 1982 - Fiction - 181 pages

Fire on the Mountain Grandfather John Vogelin's land is his life -- a barren stretch of New Mexican wilderness, mercifully bypassed by civilization. Then the government moves in. And suddenly the elderly, mule-stubborn rancher is confronting the combined land-grabbing greed of the County Sheriff, the Department of the Interior, the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Air Force. But a tough old man is like a mountain lion: if you back hom into a conner, he'll come out fighting.

Contents

• Section 1: 1
• Section 2: 71
• Section 3: 83

About the author

Edward Abbey was born January 29, 1927 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and grew up in nearby Home. After military service in Naples, Italy, from 1945-47, he enrolled in Indiana University of Pennsylvania for a year before traveling to the West. He fell in love with the desert Southwest and eventually attended the University of New Mexico, where he obtained both graduate and post-graduate degrees. Abbey was a Fulbright Fellow from 1951-52. Abbey was an anarchist and a radical environmentalist; these positions are reflected in his writings. His novel Fire on the Mountain won the Western Heritage Award for Best Novel in 1963. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, considered by many to be his best work, is nonfiction that reflects Abbey's love for the American Southwest and draws on his experiences as a park ranger. Among his best-known works are The Brave Cowboy (1956), The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), and The Fool's Progress (1988). In 1966 The Brave Cowboy was made into a movie titled Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas. Two collections of essays have been published since his death in 1989: Confessions of a Barbarian in 1994 and The Serpents of Paradise the following year. In 1987, Abbey was offered the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, but he declined. Abbey died in March 1989, near Tucson, Arizona, from complications following surgery. He did not want a traditional burial but rather requested to be buried in the Arizona desert, where he could nourish the earth which had been the subject of so many of his works.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Fire on the Mountain
• Author: Edward Abbey
• Publisher: Avon Books, 1982
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Jun 9, 2008
• ISBN: 0380595192, 9780380595198
• Length: 181 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General