The Brave Cowboy: A Closer Look at Modern Life Anonymous College

Edward Abbey’s second novel, The Brave Cowboy, is intensely critical of modern life. The book celebrates wide-open spaces and freedom through consistent comparison to an adjacent reality: the hustle and bustle of the city. As the novel continues, we experience the challenges and constraints that Abbey connects with modernity, which Abbey deems unfortunate but unavoidable.

Abbey criticizes modern American life because he believed that wilderness should go “beyond the human” (Minteer). In The Brave Cowboy, Abbey champions a natural environment in which one can reflect without distraction, one of the common themes in the book as he laments a growing dependence on mechanical elements. As Abbey expressed in another work in 1982, Down the River, a connection to the environment is sacred because “loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see” (Minteer). Abbey shows us that meaningful, private reflection is challenged by life led in an industrialized society; he characterizes the earth as a living, teaching entity.

Abbey begins The Brave Cowboy with an ode to what he loved dearly: wide-open, undisturbed land. The prologue...