Richard Brautigan

January 1935 – September 1984


Brautigan, along with Dylan (Bob not Thomas) and soon Kerouac, Ginsberg, Miles Davis and Warhol gave me the roadmap I had been missing. The years 1968-1971 were like a door had been opened and I was kicked through it.

To a kid who did not get a proper grounding in reading or much other acedemic underpinning, someone like Brautigan was just the thing to learn not only that reading could be fun, but that there were forms I could read, and understand, and that one did not need to be a Rhodes Scholar to write, express yourself, and get published. I was smart enough, however, to know the difference between pop art and more serious artistic forms - but it was usually the former that led me to the latter.

Trout Fishing in America, his best known work, was an experimental novel published in 1967. At that time, for me, a book was a book. They all looked the same and were structured the same, and for me certainly all equally unapproachable. On some level I knew there was more to writing but me and alot of other people had yet to see it. Then, suddenly there was Trout Fishing. In my favorite chapter "The Hunchback Trout" the creek is likend to 12, 845 phonebooths and he, the fisherman, is a telephone repairman - and when he cooks the trout later its hump tastes "sweet as the kisses of Esmeralda." Each 1 to 6 page chapter was another beautiful metaphoric journey - and I could finish the book in a day.

Then came books of poetry with titles like Rommel Drives Deep Into Egypt and Loading Mercury with A Pitchfork each with its cache of jewel-like poems falling somewhere between haiku and heaven.

About the same time came malls and the first chain bookstores "Waldens" followed by some more eclectic independent suburban bookstores, making these books available to anyone to browse or buy. No more sterile libraries hiding faceless books on endless shelves shrouded in the mystery of Melvil Dewey's daunting decimal classification system in casketlike drawers of cards.

Brautigan's star faded along with the '60's subculture and the '70's brought more new style writers like Tom Robbins, Douglas Adams, and more published poetry joined his books in the growing Poetry sections of the bookstores. But my original (now out of print) Brautigan books (with their $1.95 and $2.95) prices still occupy very hallowed space in my collection - and my heart, as does Richard, who much like Kerouac and others found life a tough hand to play.











Sample 1:Bio

Sample 2:Poems

Sample 3:Trout Fishing In America