Edward Abbey was one of our best writers ever to tackle freedom, wilderness and the American West.

Some would argue he was one of our best writers, period.

And ”The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West” is one of Abbey’s very best books.

Abbey wrote 20 works of fiction and nonfiction before he died in 1989.

Originally published in 1977, ”The Journey Home” includes 23 vintage essays ranging in subject from the great American desert he so loved to a paean to mountain lions.

In between he takes on short-sighted dam builders, the ”Sahara Club,” the Mormon Church, lefties, righties and fence sitters.

What set Abbey apart was his voice.

”Abbey is a gadfly with a stinger like a scorpion, the most effective publicist of the West’s curious desire to rape itself since Bernard DeVoto,” Wallace Stegner wrote of Abbey.

Abbey wrote of Abbey: ” … I am not a naturalist. Hardly even a sportsman. True, I bagged my first robin at the age of seven, with a BB gun back on the farm in Home, Pennsylvania, but the only birds I can recognize without hesitation are the turkey vulture, the fried chicken, and the rosy-bottomed skinny-dipper. My favorite animal is the crocodile. I’ll never make it as a naturalist. If a label is required say that I am one who loves unfenced country. The open range. Call me a ranger. Though I’ve hardly earned the title I claim it anyway. The only higher honor I’ve heard of is to be called a man.”

He was a man who never ran from a fight, who had loyal friends and pernicious enemies, and who loved untrammeled wilderness.

Abbey also wrote (in the book’s introduction): ”If certain ideas and emotions are expressed in these pages with what seems an extreme intransigence, it is not merely because I love an argument and wish to provoke (though I do), but because I am – really am – an extremist, one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another. That’s the way I like it.”

That’s good for us readers. For Abbey is never boring and always thought-provoking.

Among other books, Abbey penned: ”Fire on The Mountain,” ”Black Sun,” ”Fool’s Progress,” ”Abbey’s Road” and two disparate classics, ”The Monkey Wrench Gang” and ”Desert Solitaire.”

Published by Plume, ”The Journey Home” is a 242-page trade paperback. It retails for $14.