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''Jonathan Troy'' (1954) was Edward Abbey's first published novel, as detailed in James M. Cahalan's biography of Abbey. Only 5,000 copies were printed and almost immediately after it was released the author wanted to disown the work. He asked that it never be published again, and it has not been, making it very rare and the only one of his eight novels that many Edward Abbey fans have not read. When a fan once asked where they could find a copy of the novel, Abbey is reported to have told them "I don't know where you can find one, but if you do, burn it." Copies of the book offered for sale online start at $1,300 and go up to $4,500. Abbey's disgust with the novel was immediate. According to James M. Cahalan's biography, ''Edward Abbey, A Life'', he could barely get through the galleys before the book was published. He said it seemed "even worse than I had thought," too "juvenile, naive, succeeded in almost nothing. Too much empty rhetoric, not enough meat and bone. Not convincing. All the obvious faults of the beginner." In 1984 Abbey was quoted by William Plummer in "Edward Abbey's Desert Solecisms" as saying that Jonathan Troy "was a disgusting novel, fortunately long out of print. ... It's about the agonies of growing up in a small town: pimples and masturbation. There's a Faulkner chapter, an entire chapter in one sentence ... There's a Thomas Wolfe wind-through-the-trees-outside-the-farmhouse chapter, a Joyce chapter, and of course there are newspaper clips all through the thing, like in Dos Passos's Nineteen Nineteen." This is the only one of Abbey's eight novels that was set entirely east of the Mississippi River and away from his beloved deserts of the Southwestern United States. He does spend a good portion of The Fool's Progress in West Virginia, but it starts in Tucson and then follows a road trip to its climax. ==Background== In high school Abbey kept a journal and often used the moniker Jonathan Troy to refer to himself. While no one has claimed that the book is in any way an autobiographical account, it was not well received by people who had known Abbey during his senior year of high school. The contempt Jonathan shows for the residents of his home town was a hard blow to people Abbey knew in high school, a fact that may have had something to do with Abbey's later regret at having published this book. Still, as with his later novels, the book contains more fiction than fact. For example, in the book, Jonathan lives alone with his one-eyed father. In real life, both of Abbey's parents were living and his father had two perfectly good eyes. According to the back of the book jacket, Abbey began writing Jonathan Troy as a creative writing assignment at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque under the sponsorship of Professor C.V. Wicker. After receiving his B.A. degree in 1951, Abbey spent a year at the University of Edinburgh. It was there that the greater part of Jonathan Troy was completed. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jonathan Troy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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