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.”
