Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness is an autobiographical work by American writer Edward Abbey, originally published in 1968. His fourth book and his first book-length non-fiction work, it follows three fictional books: Jonathan Troy (1954), The Brave Cowboy (1956), and Fire on the Mountain (1962). Although it initially garnered little attention, Desert Solitaire was eventually recognized as an iconic work of nature writing and a staple of early environmentalist writing, bringing Abbey critical acclaim and popularity as a writer of environmental, political, and philosophical issues. Based on Abbey's activities as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in the late 1950s, the book is often compared to Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. It is written as a series of vignettes about Abbey's experiences in the Colorado Plateau region of the desert Southwestern United States, ranging from vivid descriptions of the fauna, flora, geology, and human inhabitants of the area, to firsthand accounts of wilderness exploration and river running, to a polemic against development and excessive tourism in the national parks, to stories of the author's work with a search and rescue team to pull a human corpse out of the desert. The book is interspersed with observations and discussions about the various tensions – physical, social, and existential – between humans and the desert environment. Many of the chapters also engage in lengthy critiques of modern Western civilization, United States politics, and the decline of America's natural environment. Background In 1956 and 1957, Edward Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger for the United States National Park Service at 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 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. 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 These notes remained unpublished for almost a decade while Abbey pursued other jobs and attempted with only moderate success