Richard Brautigan

This is an homage to Richard Brautigan, one of my favorite American authors.

In 1984 at the age of 49 Brautigan killed himself in his cabin in Bolinas, a scenic coastal town north of San Francisco. Ironically, his agent found the decomposed body when he showed up to tell Brautigan he had just sold his latest novel after years of having new manuscripts rejected.

Brautigan wrote 11 novels, 10 poetry collections and 2 short story collections. In my opinion his best work is:

"A Confederate General From Big Sur" (1964): "A wacky, hilarious yarn, funny in a far-out, fantastic fashion. The author's talent -- and this he unmistakably has -- lies in his deadpan whimsy." (Dallas Morning News)

"The Abortion" (1971): "Gentle laughter. The likelihood of unlikely romance. The absurdities of human beings. All these are a part of The Abortion. Bizarre putdowns, acute comic observations. Who but Brautigan could divide a seduction into four parts and get away with it? A whimsical delight." (Washington Post)

"Revenge of the Lawn" (1971), a collection of strangely compelling very short stories that read like poems as much as prose.

Brautigan was born in Spokane, Washington, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. In his early 20s he settled in San Francisco, where he handed out his poetry on street corners and read his poems in coffee houses that were gathering spots for writers and artists during the beatnik era. His fame came years later when he began writing about the hippy scene in the San Francisco Bay area. He was called the author laureate of the hippy generation and widely considered the best fiction writer who came out of the counter-culture.

Periodically, Brautigan lived on a ranch in Montana, where his friends and neighbors included a wild bunch of artists including actor Peter Fonda, musician Jimmy Buffet and a few other fiction writers.

Tall and lanky, Brautigan had long hair, a bushy mustache and wire-rimmed glasses and he often wore jeans and a ten-gallon hat, making him look like a hippy cowboy.

Publisher and friend Seymour Lawrence eulogized Brautigan as "a true American genius in the tradition of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner," who became a counterculture hero during the 1960s because of his ability to articulate with humor and imagery the growing disillusionment with the American Dream. Another friend, writer Thomas McGuane, described Brautigan as "a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy."

Brautigan's work, life and death inspired me to write a short story titled "The Man Who Lived in a Maxfield Parrish Painting." Parrish's ethereal paintings were popular among hippies during the 1960s.

"Dawn" by Parrish:
http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a2...er/parrish.jpg

Thank you for posting this thread, starrwriter, as I never knew this of Brautigan's life. I definitely consider myself a fan of much of his poetry, though some of it can get somewhat . . . invasive. Regardless, he promoted the development of a then-blooming style of writing, also promoted and adopted by writers like Charles Bukowski, many of the beat poets, and, later, writers like Chuck Palahniuk. Surely, the literary world would have seemed vastly different without him. :nod:

Brautigan's awesome especially The Abortion and the Revenge of the Lawn.

I especially liked his child-like openess and I always felt there was a lot of sensitivity in his writing....He could also be very funny.

Of his later books, Willard and his Bowling Trophies is worth checking out.