Although Abbey rejected the label of nature writing to describe his work, "Desert Solitaire" was one of a number of influential works which contributed to the popularity and interest in the nature writing genre in the 1960s and 1970s. Abbey cited as inspiration and referred to other earlier writers of the genre, particularly Mary Hunter Austin, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, whose style Abbey echoed in the structure of his work. However, Abbey's writing in this period was also significantly more confrontational and politically charged than in earlier works, and like contemporary Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring", he sought to contribute to the wider political movement of environmentalism which was emerging at the time. Abbey went on to admire the nature writing and environmentalist contemporaries of that period, particularly Annie Dillard.