Richard Brautigan

Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30 1935 - September 1984) was an American writer, best known for the novel Trout Fishing in America.

Related Topics:
January 30 - 1935 - September - 1984 - American - Writer - Trout Fishing in America

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Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington and is best known for the works he produced while living in San Francisco in the 1960s. In the spring of 1967, Brautigan was Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology. At age 49, Richard Brautigan died of a self-inflicted .44 gunshot wound to the head in Bolinas, California. The exact date of his suicide is unknown, but it is speculated that Brautigan ended his life on September 14, 1984 after talking to Marcia Clay on the telephone. Robert Yench found Brautigan's body in Brautigan's house on the living room floor on October 25, 1984. http://www.brautigan.net/brautigan/chronology1980.html

Related Topics:
Tacoma, Washington - San Francisco - 1960s - 1967 - California Institute of Technology - Bolinas, California

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Brautigan's prose and poetry often dealt with the tenuous and often impossible relationships a person tries to form with the world. Whether it is by history (A Confederate General from Big Sur), geography and time (The Tokyo-Montana Express), or memory (Sombrero Fallout), Brautigan's gentle protagonist/narrators often find their plans thwarted by the sometimes inexplicable vicissitudes of existence. Sometimes solace can be found in either a new love (The Abortion) or just a casual participation in the world (In Watermelon Sugar).

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Brautigan's writings are also characterized by a remarkable and humorous imagination. The permeation of inventive metaphors lent even his prose works the feeling of poetry. To his critics, however, Brautigan was willfully naive. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said of him, "I always kept waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. I never could stand cute writing. He could never be an important writer -- like Hemingway -- with that childish voice of his. Essentially he had a naïf style, a style based on a childlike perception of the world. The hippie cult was itself a childlike movement. I guess Richard was all the novelist the hippies needed. It was a nonliterate age."

Related Topics:
Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Hemingway

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Brautigan's work became identified with the counterculture youth movement of the late 1960s even though it is noted that Brautigan was contemptuous of hippies (see Lawrence Wright article in Rolling Stone Apr. 11, 1985 http://www.brautigan.net/brautigan/obituaries.html#wright). Brautigan's eccentric appearance and manner did not help to dissuade this conception of him and his work. During the 1960's several of Brautigan's short stories appeared in Rolling Stone and were later collected in Brautigan's The Revenge of the Lawn.

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The critical backlash of the late 1970s and early 1980s did much to hasten his suicide despite Brautigan's literary fame in Japan in the late 1970's. Brautigan once wrote, "All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds. Bang."

Related Topics:
1970s - 1980s

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Brautigan's daughter Ianthe Brautigan describes her memories of her father in her book You can't catch death (2000).

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