Background
Although the location is not mentioned by name in the novel, it is set at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, where Abbey worked at the time as a fire lookout in the fire tower just east of the main entrance at the North Rim. Stephen J. Pyne in his memoirs of his years as a firefighter at the North Rim, Fire on the Rim, wrote, concerning Abbey: "...fire busts came and went with hardly a word from the North Rim tower. Whether Abner was even in the tower, no one could say. He was a writer, and the only smokes he reported were the ones in his novels. He lived in a trailer behind the entrance cabin, but he was absent so often that he demonstrated that we did not need a lookout, because having Abner in the tower was the same as having no one. The position was abolished." Abbey was there for four seasons and wrote a nonfiction account in his book Abbey's Road.
Abbey dedicated the book to his second wife Judy, who had died of acute leukemia just before publication of the novel. Because Judy had spent some time with Abbey when he worked as a fire ranger, some readers naturally believe the book is based on their relationship. However, according to James M. Cahalan's "Edward Abbey, A Life," the character of Sandy MacKenzie was actually based on a woman Abbey had an affair with in 1963. His first draft of this book was completed in 1968, two years before Judy's death. Calhalan writes: "... it was a bone of contention in their marriage. He reported on March 17, 1968, that Judy hated it, 'thinking it the story of one of my old love affairs, which in a way it is, but only in a greatly altered and much exaggerated way. If only she understood that there's nothing deader than a dead romance.'"
Black Sun may have been the original title considered to an earlier book Abbey had written about a group of young mohicans driving across the western United States on U.S. Route 66, but the book was never published and remains unpublished to this day. Terry Bisson wrote in American Rebels (2003) that the title Abbey was considering was "Down the Road." The reason that manuscript was never published was because not long after Abbey finished his book, On the Road by Jack Kerouac appeared, and the two books bore so many resemblances that Abbey feared he would be accused of plagiarism if his novel were published.
Read more about this topic: Black Sun (Edward Abbey novel)
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