Black Sun (Edward Abbey novel)

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Black Sun is a 1971 novel by Edward Abbey about a rugged forest fire lookout who falls in love with an American girl half his age and then becomes wrongly blamed when she mysteriously disappears in the National Park where he works.

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.

Black Sun was actually the original title given to an earlier book Abbey had written about a group of young bohemians driving across the western United States on Route 66, but the book was never published and remains unpublished to this day. The reason 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. Instead, the Black Sun title was used for the later novel Abbey wrote based on his North Rim fire lookout experience.