Jack Burns is the lead character in Abbey's 1956 anarchistic fable, The Brave Cowboy. Set in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Duke City), it was later made into a movie (1962), Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas, and the film was shot in Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains (photo credit: Deidre St. Louis). Dalton Trumbo, a Montrose, Colorado native, wrote the screenplay.
Abbey felt the film was truthful to the book, and he even worked as an "official consultant" for two days on the set.¹ Douglas regards the film as his favorite. A link to the Showman's Manual, produced as an advance marketing tool, is here.
From the cover of the book:
"The hero, Jack Burns, is a loner who refuses to accept the tyranny of life in the twentieth century. He rides his horse down the main street of Duke City and refuses to carry a draft card or any other form of identification. Burn's stubborn adherence to the values of the Old West makes him intolerable to the forces of law and order that control the New West."
The character was loosely based on Abbey's friend, Ralph Newcomb², but in my opinion, the Burns character is more than just a person. He's the personifciation of a central theme in all of Abbey's writing, freedom. Freedom from hierarchy, oppression and tyranny, and he's one of Abbey's most frequently reoccuring characters, appearing in at least three other works. A "Burns-like" character appears in The Monkey Wrench Gang in chapter nineteen "Strangers in the Night," as a bandanna wearing cowboy with one eye and a "menacing" voice riding a horse named Rosie. His horse in The Brave Cowboy was "Whiskey," but she was killed in the final chapter of that book in an accident where it was unclear what happened to Burns.
Here's an interesting photo from a first edition I found on eBay:
According
to the owner, it was supposedly "owned by Dr. T.M. Pearce, the head of
the University of New Mexico English Department and Abbey's teacher. It
was then given to a young man who knew Abbey through his father.
His father was one of Abbey's friends, the basis for his character
A.K.Sarvis in The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Dr. Pearce worked with Abbey for many years and knew him very well. He has made fascinating notes on the front of the endpaper and throughout the book, mostly on the top of the pages. He writes in the front of his memories of Abbey and his friends, "Edward is Paul Bondi in this story and a friend who was crippled but who was a cowboy. Abbey left his car out in the middle of the street one time and refused to move it in order to get thrown into the Albuquerque jail.... I had Ed in English 91, History of the English Language Summer Session 1949. He earned a C grade... English Examination 1950-51, he earned a B." The notes range from Pearce's literary criticism - he did know Abbey well as a student - to very interesting notes about places and people in New Mexico that fit the story.
The book came into the hands of the present owner through a personal connection with Dr. Pearce's family. He also knew Abbey when Abbey visited his father and remembers some wild times, part of the Abbey mystique. We will include with the book a copy of the short, but very interesting, memoir of Abbey and his father. The two were quite close as young men."
Dr. Pearce worked with Abbey for many years and knew him very well. He has made fascinating notes on the front of the endpaper and throughout the book, mostly on the top of the pages. He writes in the front of his memories of Abbey and his friends, "Edward is Paul Bondi in this story and a friend who was crippled but who was a cowboy. Abbey left his car out in the middle of the street one time and refused to move it in order to get thrown into the Albuquerque jail.... I had Ed in English 91, History of the English Language Summer Session 1949. He earned a C grade... English Examination 1950-51, he earned a B." The notes range from Pearce's literary criticism - he did know Abbey well as a student - to very interesting notes about places and people in New Mexico that fit the story.
The book came into the hands of the present owner through a personal connection with Dr. Pearce's family. He also knew Abbey when Abbey visited his father and remembers some wild times, part of the Abbey mystique. We will include with the book a copy of the short, but very interesting, memoir of Abbey and his father. The two were quite close as young men."
In Good News, the character is named Jack Burns and is described as "...clearly old, well advanced in his mortality-the sunburned beak of the nose projects above a narrow, pointed, cadaverous jaw that bristles, like cactus, with stiff, frosty stubble. Under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat the eyes, set deep and wide in cavernous sockets, look out on the world with asymmetric intensity: one eye clear, bright, lifeless, the other old and dark and tired but alive, all the same, with a melancholy passion. The left eye is glass but the other-his shooting eye-is living plasm, wired to the circuits of the mind and soul."
This matches the description in The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Burns is supposedly once again killed in Good News by a solider armed with a lance, but when the burial detail returns to find the body, it's gone. His horse, Rosie, is also gone, leaving the possibility that Burns once again escaped death.
The character also appears in Hayduke Lives!
In "GOLIATH the Super-G.E.M.":
"One hundred feet above the buried turtle, the near-dead juniper, the flattened-out canyon floor, the man on the horse sat quietly in the saddle and watched, listened, waited...The man seated on the sagging middle of the horse's back wore wrinkled dark riding pants smeared with bacon grease on thigh and hip, high boots with rusty spurs, a dirty baggy once-whites shirt of weird design (no collar, double row of buttons up the front), the dusty black scarf (anarchism?) tied about the neck, dirty white gloves with high gauntlets, and a dirty white ten-gallon comical hat with four-inch brim.
He also packed a brace of siler-plated, ivory handled, .44 magnum Ruger revolvers...his eyes, dimly visible behind the sunglasses, did not match. There was something false and alarming about one of his eyes."
¹James M. Cahalan, 
