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Encyclopedia of American Literature entry for Richard Brautigan
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Encyclopedia of American Literature: Richard Brautigan

by Newton Smith?

For a brief time in the late 1960s and 1970s, Brautigan was a literary idol. The generation of hippies, Woodstock, and Haight Ashbury adored his highly imaginative style that blended optimism with satire and outrageous situations. His books were bought with the same enthusiasm as the music of the era. After his popularity declined in the U.S., he was much admired in Japan and France.

Brautigan began his literary career in 1957 with The Return of the Rivers, a book of poetry. He was a marginal figure hanging around the Beat literary scene in San Francisco, an acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg?, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jack Kerouac, though he never accepted their sullen outlook. Before Trout Fishing in America (1967), the novel that made him famous, he published with little notice four books of poetry and the novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964).

Trout Fishing in America altered the shape of fiction in America and was one of the most popular representatives of the postmodern novel. The novel involves the narrator, his female companion, and their child wandering from one trout stream to another while witnessing scenes of violence and decay. The narrative is episodic, almost a free association of whimsy, metaphors, puns, and vivid but unconventional images. Trout Fishing in America is, among other things, a character, the novel itself as it is being written, the narrator, the narrator's inspirational muse, a pen nib, and a symbol of the pastoral ideal being lost to commercialism, environmental degradation, and social decay.

Early reviews of the novel focused on the naive pastoral optimism of the narrator, overlooking the pervasive themes of violence, death, and decay. Current criticism maintains that Brautigan's novel was not a pastoral romance but a statement that the pastoral ideal no longer worked. Again and again his characters try trout fishing but then turn to their imaginations as a way of accepting and transcending the ugly and violent facts of life.

In the postmodernist tradition, Brautigan's books are not mimetic but are self-conscious literary texts full of allusions to authors such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson?, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain?, Ernest Hemingway?, Henry Miller, and others. A Confederate General from Big Sur, constructed in much the same manner as Trout Fishing in America, is the story of a character in Big Sur who imagines himself to be a general in the Confederate army, told by a narrator working on a textual analysis of the punctuation of Ecclesiastes.

In Watermelon Sugar (1967), Brautigan's third and most serious novel, his parable for survival in the 20th century, is the story of a successful commune called iDEATH whose inhabitants survive in passive unity while a group of rebels live violently and end up dying in a mass suicide. The book can be seen as a metafiction about the act of writing and reflects Brautigan's interest in Eastern religions.

The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). Brautigan's most successful poetry publication, collected most of his early poems. The poems are brief and whimsical with bizarre metaphors, inventive language, and a casual tone, focusing on transforming everyday events into art. Subsequent poetry publications were criticized for their off-handed style and slight content.

During the 1970s, Brautigan published six novels, each representing a different genre. The novels were clever parodies of their genre but were poorly received by the critics who continued to view Brautigan as an aging hippie. The series included The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1966 (1971); The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974); Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975); Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976); Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942 (1977); and The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980).


Encyclopedia of American Literature Ed. Steven R. Serafin. New York Continuum Publishing Co. 1999. 122-123.



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