The Norwich Record | Spring 2016

English professor Sean Prentiss’ book, Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, has won the National Outdoor Book Award. The cover for Finding Abbey also took home a 2016 award from the Association of American University Presses.

Part memoir and part biography, Finding Abbey chronicles the author’s two-year search for the hidden Arizona-desert grave of environmental writer Edward Abbey, commonly called the Thoreau of the American West. In his attempt to find the grave—the location of which is known only to a handful of Abbey’s closest friends—Prentiss travels from the author’s birthplace in rural western Pennsylvania to the empty spaces of the desert Southwest. In the journey of this book, we learn about Abbey—and Prentiss.

Entropy Magazine has included Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave in its list of “Best of 2015 Nonfiction.”