A sort of junior Monkey Wrench Gang is a wonderful book called A Heart to the Hawks by Don Moser (also from 1975 — influenced by MWG?), which I’ve written about here before. Sadly, it is (still) out of print, but you can still find used copies occasionally. It’s about a young boy in post-WWII Ohio who spends his free time in a small wood with a pond near his home that becomes threatened by development in the post-war building frenzy. While there are other coming-of-age themes (girls! with boobs!) in the novel, the boy learns a lot about monkey-wrenching and how maybe it’s not the best method of protest, and while I can’t always condone monkey-wrenching, there are other, more effective and less controversial methods of channeling the monkey-wrenching impulse into saving our wild places.

This book instilled in me a love of the outdoors and a desire to protect it as well as anything else in my life. I didn’t encounter Abbey’s books until I was an adult, but AHTTH served much the same purpose for me.