Books
George Washington Hayduke's first set of adventures outlined in The Monkey Wrench Gang leave him stranded at the top of a 700-foot (210 m) cliff after a raging storm, surrounded by law enforcement officers in helicopters dropping grenades on his position. Hayduke's body is thought to be seen shredded by gunfire as he topples into the maelstrom of the raging canyon waters 700 feet (210 m) below, thus ending the last of the Monkey Wrench Gang's heroic work in America's besieged Southwest.
Edward Abbey's first work covering Hayduke was in 1975. In 1989 (the year of Abbey's death) Hayduke Lives! was released. The adventures of Hayduke and the original Monkey Wrench Gang become tied with the activities of more legitimate environmental organizations like Earth First!. The Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front did not exist at the time Abbey wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Hayduke was also referenced in other novels by Abbey. In Fire on the Mountain (1968), the owner of the local general store is named "Hayduke." In Good News (1980), the character of Jack Burns attempts to convince his son, now an adult, that he is his father. However, his son refuses to believe him, claiming that his real father was killed while blowing up a dam. Targeting the dam was always Hayduke's highest aspiration.
Read more about this topic: George Hayduke (character)
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“With a few exceptions, the critics of children’s books are remarkably lenient souls.... Most of us assume there is something good in every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.”
—Katharine S. White (1892–1977)
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