Richard (Gary) Brautigan - Life, Legacy, Books
Novelist and poet, born in Tacoma, Washington, USA. He performed public readings in San Francisco, becoming an inspiration to the flower children. His writing is highly imaginative and often surreal. His first novel was the humorous A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964). This was followed by the critically acclaimed Trout Fishing in America (1967) and the collected poems, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). A very private man, he travelled throughout the USA and spent his later years in Tokyo. After his suicide, an obituary in the Los Angeles Times described him as the literary guru of the 60s.
Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 – September 14 ?, 1984) was an American writer, best known for the novel Trout Fishing in America.
The poet Michael McClure said of Brautigan's work "there's nothing resembling it in American writing.
Life
Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew up with his mother in Eugene, Oregon, where they lived in a small shack in a state of poverty.
By the beginning of the 1960s Brautigan had published three volumes of poetry.
During the 1960s several of Brautigan's short stories appeared in Rolling Stone and were later collected in The Revenge of the Lawn.
From late 1968 to February 1969, Brautigan recorded a spoken-word album for The Beatles' short-lived record label, Zapple.
Brautigan's writings are also characterized by a remarkable and humorous imagination.
Brautigan was also heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism.
Brautigan's work became identified with the counterculture youth movement of the late 1960s, even though he was said to be contemptuous of hippies (as noted in Lawrence Wright's article in the April 11, 1985 issue of Rolling Stone ).
To his critics, Brautigan was willfully naive.
In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan died of a self-inflicted .44-calibre gunshot wound to the head in Bolinas, California. Robert Yench, a private investigator hired by Brautigan's agent to find him and inform him of a new contract offer, found Richard Brautigan's body on the living room floor of his house on October 25, 1984.
"When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water," said his friend and fellow writer, Tom McGuane.
Brautigan once wrote, "All of us have a place in history.
Legacy
Brautigan's daughter Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan describes her memories of her father in her book You Can't Catch Death (2000).
There is a folk rock band called Trout Fishing in America.
The library for unpublished works envisioned by Brautigan in his novel The Abortion now exists as The Brautigan Library in Burlington, Vermont.
There is a store, "In Watermelon Sugar", in Baltimore, Maryland named after Brautigan's novel.
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