Thanking Richard Brautigan

What does a reader do when his favorite author dies? The sudden and unexpected loss of a steady stream of preferred reading material is a shock to the reading diet, and changing diets is never an easy thing. Here's one reader's answer: write your own book, paying tribute to the author and saying thanks, all while struggling with life's humorous observations along the journey.

Few contemporary American writers have been subjected to as much laudatory abuse as Richard Brautigan who, having become famous in the 1960s, was made a cult figure for the hippy generation and was systematically refused recognition as a major novelist once the sentimental wave of the ‘greening of America’ had passed. Marc Chénetier’s study, originally published in 1983, was the first book to attempt to assess Brautigan’s writing art which, far from weakening over the years, had become, amid critical indifference, more secure in its techniques, more all-encompassing in its strategy and more iconoclastic in its goals. In analysing most of Brautigan’s fictional works in the light of his poetics, it examines the mechanisms of his metafictional and deconstructive offensive and indicates the direction in which Brautigan was moving at the time.

Best known for his novel Trout Fishing in America, American writer Richard Gary Brautigan (1935–1984) published eleven novels, ten poetry collections, and two story collections, as well as five volumes of collected work, several nonfiction essays, and a record album of spoken voice recordings. Brautigan’s idiosyncratic style and humor caused him to be identified with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. The authors of many of these 32 essays knew Brautigan personally and professionally; others came to know and respect him through a cultivated connection with his writings. The essays—many of which are new, others of which were published in obscure journals—combine personal remembrance of the man and critical appraisal of his still-controversial works. Includes previously unpublished photographs and artworks.

Collected in one volume, three counterculture classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s. Included here are three great works by the incomparable Richard Brautigan: Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through the country’s rural waterways—a book “that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to do with the lamenting of a passing pastoral America . . . An instant cult classic” (Financial Times). The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly one hundred poems, first published in 1968. And In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate. During his lifetime, Look magazine observed, “Brautigan is joining Hesse, Golding, Salinger, and Vonnegut as a literary magus to the literate young.” A uniquely imaginative writer of the Beat movement who became an icon of the hippie era, he is still a favorite of readers today.

Confident and robust, Jubilee Hitchhiker is an comprehensive biography of late novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, author of Troutfishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur, among many others. When Brautigan took his own life in September of 1984 his close friends and network of artists and writers were devastated though not entirely surprised. To many, Brautigan was shrouded in enigma, erratic and unpredictable in his habits and presentation. But his career was formidable, an inspiration to young writers like Hjortsberg trying to get their start. Brautigan's career wove its way through both the Beat–influenced San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s and the "Flower Power" hippie movement of the 1960s; while he never claimed direct artistic involvement with either period, Jubilee Hitchhiker also delves deeply into the spirited times in which he lived. As Hjortsberg guides us through his search to uncover Brautigan as a man the reader is pulled deeply into the writer's world. Ultimately this is a work that seeks to connect the Brautigan known to his fans with the man who ended his life so abruptly in 1984 while revealing the close ties between his writing and the actual events of his life. Part history, part biography, and part memoir this etches the portrait of a man destroyed by his genius.

Thoroughly grounded in the media culture of film and television, mclennan's language obscures the breadth and depth of this work.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural celebrity, a writer that the would-be hip just had to read. The problem was that his fame did not rest on the considerable literary virtues of his work but, to a great extent, on a hippie image exemplified by the photograph of him on the cover of his breakthrough novel, Trout Fishing in America. When nobody wanted tie-dye shirts and gurus any more, they didn’t want Brautigan either. Academics have followed the public’s lead: this is the first book-length study of Brautigan in English for 30 years. Its purpose is to reclaim Brautigan’s reputation. Dr. John Tanner analyses Brautigan’s fiction against the background of the cultural and literary upheavals from which it emerged and demonstrates that Brautigan is no mere Sixties curio but an innovative and vibrant American voice ignored for far too long.