STUDENT RADICAL

An addendum to Dave Foreman’s book review of “Epitaph For a Desert Anarchist” (“Anarchist With an Attitude” July 17).

Edward Abbey began shaking up the Establishment back in college at the University of New Mexico. He was editor of the campus literary magazine the Thunderbird in 1950 when I was editor of the campus paper the Lobo. Ed created a big stir with a purported quote on the Thunderbird cover from Louisa May Alcott: “Man will never be free until the last judge is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

The UNM honchos were thrown into an uproar. In Catholic-conscious New Mexico (after all, the region was settled starting in the 1500s by Catholic Spaniards), UNM brass feared a cut in appropriations from vindictive Catholics in the state legislature. Not much happened, really. The flap blew over.

TROXEY KEMPER, LOS ANGELES

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Re: your article on Abbey; specifically the boxed introductory commentary to Abbey’s last journal entry. In answer to the writer’s oh-so-correct, oh-so-pedestrian, oh-so-predictable question: political correctitude, always.

My question to the writer: to which of Abbey’s “anxious particular” sects or factions do you belong? One of them, some of them, all of them? Some people will just never get it.

WILLIAM F. WILLIAMS, LLANO, CA.