Richard Brautigan

 
Who2 Biography:

Richard Brautigan

, Writer / Poet
Richard Brautigan
Source

  • Born: 30 January 1935
  • Birthplace: Tacoma, Washington
  • Died: 25 October 1984 (suicide)
  • Best Known As: Author of Trout Fishing in America

Richard Brautigan's most famous work is the novel Trout Fishing in America (1967), a back-to-nature favorite of the San Francisco counterculture of the 1960s. Raised in Washington, Brautigan moved to San Francisco in the 1950s and began publishing poetry. During the '60s he published poems, stories and novels and was considered a generational bridge between the Beat movement and the hippies. During the '70s Brautigan lived in Montana, avoiding public attention and writing. His body was discovered 25 October 1984 -- he had taken his own life by shooting himself in the head.

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Artist: Richard Brautigan
  • Genre: Rock
  • Active: 2000s
  • Instrument: Producer, Main Performer, Poetry
  • Representative Album: "Listening to Richard Brautigan"

Biography

Richard Brautigan was a major American writer of the 1960s and 1970s, his droll, economic, gallows-humor prose linking the beatnik and hippie eras, as well as reflecting many quintessentially American character traits and scenarios. His most acclaimed novels include Trout Fishing in America, The Abortion, The Hawkline Monster, and Willard and His Bowling Trophies; he also published short stories and poetry. It's less well known that he was also a recording artist, although his career as such was short, limited largely to one spoken word album. That album, Listening to Richard Brautigan, featured the author reading excerpts from his novels, short stories, and poems, periodically embellished by some sound effects and room noise. One of the selections, "Love Poem," was read not by Brautigan but by 18 of his friends, including some who were celebrities in their own right, like poet Michael McClure, filmmaker Bruce Conner, and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. The production of Listening to Richard Brautigan was fairly laborious and protracted. Originally the album was intended to be made for Zapple, the short-lived experimental subsidiary of the Beatles' Apple label. Zapple was run by Barry Miles, a respected author in his own right and a big part of the London '60s underground scene as a partner in the Indica Bookshop and publisher of the London paper International Times. It was Miles who proposed the project to Brautigan in late 1968, as part of a series of spoken-word albums he hoped to record by literary figures, including McClure, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anais Nin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Ezra Pound, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Gary Snyder. As was the case with many projects cooked up by Apple in the late 1960s, little of these ambitious plans came to fruition. However, the Brautigan album almost did, with Miles coming to San Francisco in early 1969 to work on the production and recording. The sessions were recorded both in Brautigan's kitchen and at Golden State Recorders, a San Francisco recording studio. The album was considered enough of an impending release that Apple sent Brautigan an advance check, for a grand $200, in March 1969. However, although it reached the acetate stage and a sample sleeve had been done, Zapple, like Apple, was in serious organizational trouble. Only two albums (John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions and George Harrison's Electronic Music) were ever released on the label, which folded before Brautigan's LP was issued, although it had been scheduled to come out in late 1969. By this time relations between Brautigan and Miles were strained since, as candidly noted in Miles's memoir In the Sixties, the producer had started an affair with Brautigan's girlfriend, Valerie Estes. However, he did try in the early 1970s to place some of the material he had recorded for Zapple, with Brautigan and others, on different labels, and Harvest Records ended up putting out Listening to Richard Brautigan in 1970. This was the only album Brautigan made before his death in 1984, but he did make a little-known cameo appearance on the 1969 album by the San Francisco Bay Area band Mad River, Paradise Bar and Grill. On this record, he read his poem "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend," backed by an easygoing country-folk-rock musical track written and performed by the band's lead guitarist, David Robinson. The Brautigan-Mad River connection didn't end there: Brautigan, a fan of the band, had helped them out by buying them food when they were struggling. Mad River, in turn, used some of the advance they got after signing to Capitol to pay for the printing of his novel, Please Plant This Book. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Brautigan, Richard
(brô'təgăn) , 1935–84, American novelist and poet, b. Tacoma, Wash. He was a counterculture hero of the 1960s and 70s and his work is an indictment of America's cultural environment. Influenced by writers of the beat generation, he exhibits a hippie sensibility in his extremely original and loosely constructed fiction, his gently passive protagonists, his droll sense of comedy, and the touch of the surreal that often marks his work. His first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), was followed by Trout Fishing in America (1967), which became a national bestseller. Other novels include In Watermelon Sugar (1968), Dreaming of Babylon (1977), and The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980). Brautigan also wrote short stories, many collected in Revenge of the Lawn (1971). Among his volumes of poetry are The Pill Versus the Springfield Mine Disaster (1968) and Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976). Brautigan committed suicide in 1984. A book of poems and stories (1999) and a novel-journal (2000) were posthumously published.

Bibliography

See K. Abbott, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America (1989), and I. Brautigan, You Can't Catch Death (2000); studies by M. Chénetier (1983), E. H. Foster (1983), C. Grossman (1986), and J. Boyer (1987); annotated bibliography by J. F. Barber (1990).

 
Works: Works by Richard Brautigan
(1935-1984)

1964A Confederate General from Big Sur. Having published a number of poetry collections, Brautigan issues his first novel, which playfully combines a portrait of hippie life in California with the musings of a man who thinks he is a Confederate officer planning the siege of Oakland.
1967Trout Fishing in America. This loosely organized, comic work about the search for the perfect trout stream becomes a best-selling cult classic of the youth counterculture. It would be followed by the equally popular In Watermelon Sugar in 1968.
1970Rommel Drives Deep into Egypt. Brautigan's poetry is described by one reviewer as "an amalgam of Zen Buddhism, William Carlos Williams, and the stoned comic strips of R. Crumb."
1971The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. The last of Brautigan's popular successes and the first of a series of parodies of various fictional forms, including The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975), Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), and Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977). All would fail to duplicate his successes of the 1960s.

 
Quotes By: Richard Brautigan

Quotes:

"If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows."

 
Wikipedia: Richard Brautigan
Richard Gary Brautigan
[[Image:
The cover of the 1974 paperback edition of Trout Fishing in America
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The cover of the 1974 paperback edition of Trout Fishing in America
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Richard Brautigan
Born: January 30 1935(1935--)
Tacoma, Washington, USA
Died: September 14 1984 (aged 49)
Bolinas, California USA
Occupation: Poet, Novelist
Influences: Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac

Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935September 14 (?),[1] 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. It's as West Coast as a Douglas fir, but more broadly it's peculiarly American and Rube Goldbergian. This writing goes beyond eccentricity and into vision at times, and at others it is personal symptomology. It's not just a string of books ranging from witty and sensual to decadent and misbegotten, it's a rippling, flashing river for the critic and reader trout-fishers and gold-panners of the present and future to explore." [2]

Life

Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew up in Eugene, Oregon, where he lived with his mother. He had an older and younger sister and his parents were divorced when he was five years old and his mother remarried about seven times. Brautigan suffered physical abuse at the hands of his stepfathers and witnessed his mother being violently abused also. Many of his childhood experiences were included in the poems and "novels" Brautigan wrote while in high school.

In high school, he and his friends wandered the streets of the town of Eugene late at night and would hang out at bars and pool halls. In 1953 shortly after graduation, Brautigan left home and lived as a nomad. In 1955 he was arrested for throwing a rock through a police-station window, supposedly in order to be sent to prison and fed. Instead he was sent to Oregon State Hospital where he was declared a schizophrenic and treated there with electroconvulsive therapy.

In 1956 Brautigan left Eugene for San Francisco, California, where he lived for the rest of his life, save for periods of time spent in Tokyo, Japan, and Montana.[3] There he married Virginia Adler. Their daughter, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, was born in 1960. The marriage broke up soon afterwards.

In San Francisco, Brautigan sought to establish himself as a writer and was known for handing out his poetry on the streets. His first published "book" was The Return of the Rivers (1957), a single poem, followed by two collections of poetry: The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958), and Lay the Marble Tea (1959).

During the 1960s Brautigan became involved in the burgeoning San Francisco counterculture scene, often appearing as a performance-poet at concerts and participating in the various activities of The Diggers. His first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), met with no success when first published. But when his novel Trout Fishing in America was published in 1967, Brautigan was catapulted to international fame and labeled by literary critics as the writer best representative of the emerging counterculture. 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.)[4] Brautigan published four collections of poetry as well as another novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968) during the decade of the 1960s. Also, in the spring of 1967, Brautigan was Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology. One Brautigan novel The God of The Martians remains unpublished. The 600 word, 20 chapter manuscript was sent to at least two editors but was rejected by both. A copy of the manuscript was discovered with the papers of the last of these editors, Harry Hooton.[5]

During the 1970s Brautigan experimented with different literary genres as he published several novels and a collection of short stories. "When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water," said his friend and fellow writer, Tom McGuane. "He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy." Generally dismissed by literary critics and increasingly abandoned by his readers, Brautigan's popularity waned throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s. His work remained popular in Europe, however, as well as in Japan, and Brautigan visited there several times.[6]

To his critics, Brautigan was willfully naive. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said of him, "As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people."[7]

Listening to Richard Brautigan
Enlarge
Listening to Richard Brautigan

From late 1968 to February 1969, Brautigan recorded a spoken-word album for The Beatles' short-lived record-label, Zapple. The label was shut down by Allen Klein before the recording could be released, but it was eventually released in 1970 on Harvest Records as Listening to Richard Brautigan.[8]

Brautigan's writings are characterized by a remarkable and humorous imagination. The permeation of inventive metaphors lent even his prose-works the feeling of poetry. Evident also are themes of Zen Buddhism like the duality of the past and the future and the impermanence of the present. Zen Buddhism and elements of the Japanese culture can be found in his novels like The Tokyo-Montana Express and Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel.

In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot-wound in Bolinas, California. The exact date of his death is unknown, but it is speculated that Brautigan ended his life on September 14, 1984 after talking to Marcia Clay, a former girlfriend of his, on the telephone. Robert Yench, a private investigator, found Richard Brautigan's body on the living-room floor of his house on October 25, 1984.[9]

Brautigan once wrote, "All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds."

Legacy

Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, describes her memories of her father in her book You Can't Catch Death (2000).

In March 1994, a Carpinteria, California teenager named Peter Eastman Jr. legally changed his name to "Trout Fishing in America", and now teaches English in Japan. [10] At around the same time, National Public Radio reported on a young couple who had named their baby "Trout Fishing in America".

There is a folk rock band called Trout Fishing in America.[11], and another called Watermelon Sugar[12], which quotes the opening paragraph of that book on their home page. The Machines originally called themselves Machines of Loving Grace, from one of Brautigan's best-known poems.

Twin Rocks, Oregon, a song appearing on singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins' 1998 platinum record Soul's Core, seems to tell the story of a fictitious meeting with Brautigan on bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Another lyrical interpretation might be that the encounter was with Brautigan's ghost.

In the UK The Library of Unwritten Books is a project in which ideas for novels are collected and stored. The venture is inspired by Brautigan's novel 'The Abortion.'

The library for unpublished works envisioned by Brautigan in his novel The Abortion now exists as The Brautigan Library in Burlington, Vermont.[13]

There are two stores named "In Watermelon Sugar" after Brautigan's novella, one in Baltimore, Maryland and one in Traverse City, Michigan.

Books

Fiction

Poetry

  • The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, 1958
  • Lay the Marble Tea, 1959
  • The Octopus Frontier, 1960
  • All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, 1963
  • Please Plant This Book, 1968
  • The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, 1968
  • Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt, 1970
  • Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, (1971 ISBN 0-671-22263-5. ISBN 0-671-22271-6 pbk)
  • June 30th, June 30th, (1978 ISBN 0-440-04295-X)
  • The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, (1999 ISBN 0-395-97469-0)

References

External links

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Who2 Biography. Copyright © 1998-2008 by Who2, LLC. All rights reserved. See the Richard Brautigan biography from Who2.  Read more
Artist. Copyright © 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ® , a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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