Coug, I went to your profile, and then to Abbey's Web, but each time I clicked on an entry, I got nothing but a blank page (except for the wrench symbol on the left of the page). Frustrating.
So I went to the wonderful book review link Christopher provided (thanks again, Christopher), and turned up some interesting stuff. The following passage, from a generally favorable review in The New York Times in 1984, suggests to me that you may have gotten some of your dislike for "literary snobs" from Abbey. (My dad, a poet, used to say things like this -- at least until Macmillan published his collected poems. <g>)
Generally, but not always, the East Coast literary establishment, whatever that is, either ignored or ridiculed him. In return, Abbey got mad. He turned into a writer of letters to the editor. In the journals, he attacks just about everyone -- Harper's Magazine, Time, even National Geographic. The respect of his peers was crucially important to Abbey, but he never seemed to catch on to the principle that when you call reviewers "lesbians or New Agers or fem-libbers or (even worse) male fem-libbers or technophiles or self-hating white liberals or right-wing conservatives or Growth maniacs or Negroes or female Negroes or third world lesbian militant Negro poetesses or closet Marxists (Marxoids) or futurologists or academical specialists or Chicano ideologues or ballerinas or Kowboy Kultists or Kerouac Kultists or Henry James Minimalist Perfectionists or one-tenth Chippewa 'Native American' Indians or at very least and all-inclusive Official Correct-Thinking Liberals etc. etc.," as he does in the very last entry before his death, those reviewers will not approach your work with a positive attitude.
search.nytimes.com
Writers are as sensitive as anyone else to criticism, and the history of literature is full of their fulminations against The Establishment. But it is not always advisable to pay too much attention to their fulminations, because they tend to forget the good things critics say about them.
The following article was published in the premier bastion of "literary snobbery," The New York Review of Books, in 1988, a year before Abbey's death. It is a thoughtful and sympathetic examination of Abbey's ideas, and convinced me that he is a writer worth reading. You might find it interesting yourself.
nybooks.com
Joan
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