David Gessner Quote

DeVoto shared with Stegner an ability to see the big picture. But he shared plenty with Abbey, too: a tendency toward overstatement, a willingness to bloody noses, a love of tweaking the overly proper and accepted. Stegner once called DeVoto the Lone Ranger, and one can easily imagine DeVoto standing alone in the 1940s and ’50s, keeping a mob of vigilantes (politicians, developers, ranchers, oil men) at bay as they clamored on about taking back their land. Stegner joined DeVoto in the fight, but it wasn’t until Ed Abbey came along that anyone took to the fight with anywhere near the same cantankerous spirit.

David Gessner

DeVoto shared with Stegner an ability to see the big picture. But he shared plenty with Abbey, too: a tendency toward overstatement, a willingness to bloody noses, a love of tweaking the overly proper and accepted. Stegner once called DeVoto the Lone Ranger, and one can easily imagine DeVoto standing alone in the 1940s and ’50s, keeping a mob of vigilantes (politicians, developers, ranchers, oil men) at bay as they clamored on about taking back their land. Stegner joined DeVoto in the fight, but it wasn’t until Ed Abbey came along that anyone took to the fight with anywhere near the same cantankerous spirit.

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About David Gessner

David Gessner is an American essayist, memoirist, nature writer, editor, and cartoonist.
Gessner was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard College where he worked at the Harvard Crimson drawing political cartoons, most notably a drawing of Ronald Reagan urinating on an unemployed man in the gutter, entitled "The Trickle Down Theory". He was awarded his degree in 1983. He is married to the novelist Nina de Gramont.
He is the author of eleven books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness and the New York Times-bestselling All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. His prizes include a Pushcart Prize, the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay, the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017 he appeared on the National Geographic Explorer show "The Call of the Wild".