Ed wrote me on August 23, 1985: “Sacco and Vanzetti executed on this date in 1927, the year of my birth. Jack Macrae is next.” The novel, then called The Confessions of Henry Lightcap, was well advanced, Ed reported. He had just returned from the high plateaus of Utah and Colorado “refreshed and ready to return to work…. What I hope is to get another 300 pages or so on your desk by Christmas—the final 300–400 page section by May Day 1986. Then we’ll begin the hard work of editing, revising and—if necessary—reshaping the whole.” Abbey had taken a year’s leave from his teaching job at the University of Arizona in order to work full-time on the novel. “Now or never! Mt. Olympus or bust!” he added in a postscript.

When The Fool’s Progress arrived in the summer of 1987 it was 901 pages. In November an academic acquaintance of Ed’s named Donn Rawlings, Ph.D., cautioned Abbey in a detailed critique not to make major cuts: “Give your readers a chance to learn how to read this novel. Don’t let those eastern editors get their scissors on this one—they may not understand where the frontiers of American fiction really are.” Despite Dr. Rawlings’s advice the published book came in at under five hundred pages; Ed wrote me a gracious note in appreciation of the editing, which I hasten to add was in large measure his, not mine. One worry of the academic reader was that other readers would make a too-simple equation between the persona of Abbey and the fictional Henry Lightcap. He wanted Ed to tell readers that “some fictive selection and distancing is going on,” to help readers “to look at the redneck Henry more objectively, as a free-standing creation, however much he may overlap the known biography and views of the essay-persona Abbey.”

Ed wouldn’t have sent me Rawlings’s letter unless he agreed with its overall assessment. His one demurrer was Rawlings’s suggestion that the “Archie Bunkerisms” be cut. (Ed responded to this criticism by writing in the margins of the academic’s letter: “I’m not going to toady to chickenshit liberalism anymore; fuck it. I’ve already been called fascist, racist, elitist as well as communist, terrorist, misanthrope, bleeding-heart, etc. so often it doesn’t bother me anymore. To hell with all those petty, taboo-ridden dogmatic minds.”) Abbey was heartened by the letter’s attention to the novel’s rhythm and its “big, baggy richness.” As he was with Publishers Weekly’s Baker and Time magazine’s John Skow, who said The Fool’s Progress “is skilled enough to pull sympathetic readers into his own mood of regret, not just for long-gone youth and foolishness, but for small-town, big-sky Western life as it was before shopping malls and industrial parks ate the best of it.” Other critics disagreed. Rawlings and many other astute Abbey fans admired the novel’s pacing, the shifts of person and tense, the excesses and the “marvelous humor.” Even though Rawlings made my job more difficult I knew he was right when he wrote Ed, “The complacent critical cranks will go on cranking without ever allowing themselves to see what is there.”