No place like home - Letters - Letter to the Editor

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 2003 by James M. Cahalan

In her review of my book Edward Abbey and Jack Loeffler's Adventures With Ed ("Mixed Media," September/ October 2002), Sunamita Lim claims that my account of Abbey's life runs "from Abbey's birth in Home, Pennsylvania, to his last years in Oracle, Arizona." But Abbey was not born in Home (though he grew up near there), and he never lived in Oracle (though he kept a postal box there).

As I make clear in my book, these were two parts of Abbey's powerful, self-created mythology. Of Loeffler's book, Lim writes, "in 1959, Abbey, Loeffler, and two friends became a chainsaw gang" by cutting down billboards. Yet Loeffler did not meet Abbey until after reading Desert Solitaire in 1969.

James M. Cahalan
Indiana, Pennsylvania