Who Was Richard Brautigan?
Richard Brautigan was the most beloved and the most melancholy of the counterculture writers — a poet and novelist whose gentle, whimsical prose style made him a central figure of the San Francisco literary scene of the 1960s and whose later life and suicide in 1984 revealed the darkness that had always underlain the whimsy. Born in Tacoma, Washington, he grew up in poverty, spent time in a mental institution as a teenager, and arrived in San Francisco in the late 1950s, where he became part of the Beat literary world before the counterculture claimed him as its own.
His novel Trout Fishing in America (1967) became one of the defining texts of the counterculture — a fragmented, lyrical meditation on America, nature, loss, and the gap between the pastoral ideal and the industrial reality. His poetry collections — particularly The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968) — established him as one of the most distinctive lyric voices of his generation: simple in diction, large in implication, and always shadowed by a grief that his humor could not entirely conceal.
Brautigan is significant for TLA because his work is organized around a longing for innocence and pastoral simplicity that his own life and his own century had made permanently inaccessible — a longing that is, at its root, a longing for Eden.
In Their Own Words
“I want to fish on the other side of the river where the grass is greener and the trout are more willing.”
— Trout Fishing in America“All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”
— attributed“The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.”
— Trout Fishing in AmericaSelected Bibliography
- Trout Fishing in America — 1967 — novel
- In Watermelon Sugar — 1968 — novel
- The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster — 1968 — poetry
- Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt — 1970 — poetry
- Dreaming of Babylon — 1977 — novel
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