Jonathan Troy

Jonathan Troy (1954) was Edward Abbey's first published novel, as detailed in James M. Cahalan's biography of Abbey. Only 5,000 copies were printed and almost immediately after it was released the author wanted to disown the work. He asked that it never be published again, and it has not been, making it very rare and the only one of his eight novels that many Edward Abbey fans have not read. When a fan once asked where they could find a copy of the novel, Abbey is reported to have told them "I don't know where you can find one, but if you do, burn it." Copies of the book offered for sale online start at $1,300 and go up to $7,500. Abbey's disgust with the novel was immediate. According to James M. Cahalan's biography, Edward Abbey, A Life, he could barely get through the galleys before the book was published. He said it seemed "even worse than I had thought," too "juvenile, naive, succeeded in almost nothing. Too much empty rhetoric, not enough meat and bone. Not convincing. All the obvious faults of the beginner." In 1984 Abbey was quoted by William Plummer in "Edward Abbey's Desert Solecisms" as saying that Jonathan Troy "was a disgusting novel, fortunately long out of print. ... It's about the agonies of growing up in a small town: pimples and masturbation. There's a Faulkner chapter, an entire chapter in one sentence ... There's a Thomas Wolfe wind-through-the-trees-outside-the-farmhouse chapter, a Joyce chapter, and of course there are newspaper clips all through the thing, like in Dos Passos's Nineteen Nineteen." This is the only one of Abbey's eight novels that was set entirely east of the Mississippi River and away from his beloved deserts of the Southwestern United States. He does spend a good portion of The Fool's Progress in West Virginia, but it starts in Tucson and then follows a road trip to its climax.