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Anthologies that include selections of Brautigan's writing

The Portable Sixties Reader
Edited by Ann Charters
Penguin Classics, 2003

Includes the the chapter The Cleveland Wrecking Yard? from Trout Fishing in America

The introduction to the Brautigan excerpt reads:

Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan lived in the Bay Area and shared the West Coast hippie ethos of the Beat Writers?, although in his fiction he rejected Kerouac’s autobiographical approach to “true story novels” and his spontaneous prose style. Instead Brautigan admired Hemingway’s? literary style and wrote surreal fantasies, as in “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard?,” a chapter in Trout Fishing in America (1967). He dedicated his book to the poets Jack Spicer? and Ron Loewinsohn?. Brautigan’s search for the ideal trout stream in this book also suggests a satirical glance at the ultimate reaches of consumer capitalism in the United States, as well as how much the country had changed since Hemingway described fishing for trout in “The Big Two-Hearted River” (1925).

(pp 429-435)


City Wilds: Essays and Short Stories About Urban Nature
Edited by Terrell F. Dixon
University of Georgia Press, 2002

Includes the the chapter The Cleveland Wrecking Yard? from Trout Fishing in America

The introduction to the Brautigan excerpt reads:

Richard Brautigan was born in Spokane in 1935, and he died in Bolinas, California, in 1984. He taught at the California Institute of Technology and Montana State University. The whimsical environmental commentary characteristic of Brautigan’s work led the writer Guy Davenport to describe him as “a kind of Thoreau who cannot keep a straight face.” Although he also wrote poetry, Brautigan is best known for his fiction that includes such works as A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America (1967), and Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962—1970 (1971). The short story below is from Trout Fishing in America. By using a matter of fact style to talk about segments of a “used trout stream” for sale, “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard?” amplifies Brautigan’s satire of society’s efforts to control and commodify nature.

(pp 299-304)


California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present
Edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost & Jack Hicks
Heyday Books, 2003

Includes the poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace?

The introduction to the Brautigan excerpt reads:

Richard Brautigan (1933—1984)

The turbulent life of Richard Brautigan, whose classic experimental novel, Trout Fishing in America (1967), embodied the sensibility of an American generation, began in Tacoma, Washington, in 1933. His mother moved the family to Eugene, Oregon, where he spent childhood in poverty. At twenty he was arrested for throwing a rock through a police station explaining that he wanted to go to jail so that he could eat. Instead he was sent to Oregon State Hospital, where he was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and treated with electroshock therapy. He left Oregon soon after his release and moved to San Francisco sometime around 1955.

In San Francisco, Brautigan became involved in the Beat movement, His first known poem, "The Second Kingdom" was published in 1956, and his first poetry chapbook, Four New Poets, was published by Inferno Press in 1957. His first book was Lay the Marble Tea (1959), a collection of twenty-four poems. Brautigan published seven more books of poetry, alternating them with distinctive novels and collections of short fiction. As the Beats subsided in influence and elided into the hippie movement in the late sixties, Brautigan flourished and his literary reputation grew, first by broadsides, small press publications, and word of mouth. Then New York found him and published his most popular works, including A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America (1967), and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). Brautigan’s fiction reached huge audiences, particularly Trout Fishing in America, which established him as a whimsical counterculture icon and unwitting spokesman for the “California dreamin’” of the generation of love. Poems such as “The Galilee Hitch-Hiker” and “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” drew nontraditional young readers to poetry, and collections such as The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968) also grew his audience. Lacking any formal education, and on the strength of his published work alone, Brautigan was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant and became poet in residence at the California Institute of Technology.

In the early 1970s he continued publishing poetry and prose but found fame overbearing, and be sought escape by moving to Pine Creek, Montana, for a reclusive life among the Rocky Mountain chic. He refused to give interviews or do readings for the next eight years. By the late 1970s, Brautigan found himself ignored by critics and nearly forgotten by audiences who had hailed him as a major new voice a decade earlier. He had protracted bouts with drugs and alcohol, and as his bitterness grew and he developed an affinity for weapons, he alienated all but a few friends. In 1978, he was briefly back in the public eye when five of his works were banned from a California high school and the subsequent ACLU court case? was decided in favor of Brautigan and his publisher.

By 1980, his popularity had waned further, his talent was eroded by drugs and alcohol, and Montana acquaintances were relieved when he moved back to California. But his erratic habits isolated him there even more, and on October 25, 1984, Richard Brautigan’s body was found at home in Bolinas, California, a suicide by gunshot. He had apparently been dead for some time.

Whether writing poetry or prose, Brautigan was near-Asian in evocative restraint, working in a spare but witty style. At its best, his work captured the sensibilities of an entire counterculture generation: stylistically unadorned, whimsical in voice, endowed with a doe-eyed innocence, imbued with a deadpan sense of gentle satiric humor that caused one critic to liken him to Mark Twain? high on marijuana.

(pp 187-189)


Unfolding Beauty: Celebrating California's Landscapes
Edited by Terry Beers
HeyDay Books, 2000

Includes the 2 chapters Tom Martin Creek & The Hunchback Trout? from Trout Fishing in America
The introduction to the Brautigan excerpts reads:

Richard Brautigan

In the 1960s Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) helped to create the New Fiction, penning self-conscious, protean, playful works that explore the limits of traditional storytelling and question the relationship between language and the world. Small press editions of his early work included Trout Fishing in America, which was already one of the most popular books on college campuses by the time Brautigan found a major publisher (Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut? Delacorte Press reprinted three of his novels). Brautigan's vision of industrial society under attack from "Trout Fishing in America Terrorists" appealed to a growing body of readers sensitive to the threat that rampant materialism posed to nature.

Brautigan died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1984. But during his short lifetime, he published short stories, several collections of poetry, and a number of offbeat, idiosyncratic novels including A Confederate General from Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar. But the quirky Trout Fishing in America is still his best known and best loved work. This episodic tour-de-force often filters the landscape through unusual, even surreal perspectives — here a plumber's and a phone user's.

(pp 84-88)


Faith and fiction : the modern short story
by Robert Detweiler; Glenn Meeter (eds)
Grand Rapids : W.B. Eerdmans, 1979.
Includes The kool-aid wino

Sudden fiction international : sixty short-short stories
by Robert Shapard; James Thomas
New York : Norton, 1989.
Includes The weather in San Francisco

The secret life of our times: new fiction from Esquire.
by Gordon Lish
Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1973.
Includes The lost chapters of trout fishing in America

Postmodern American fiction : a Norton anthology
by Paula Geyh; Fred Leebron; Andrew Levy
New York : W.W. Norton, 1998.
Includes The cover for trout fishing in America and Trout death by port wine

The Norton book of American short stories
by Peter S Prescott
New York : Norton, 1988.
Includes Revenge of the lawn

Mini-fiction
by Kiyoshi Nakayama; Toshiko Ishihara
Tokyō : Ikubundo, 1999.
Includes Corporal

Where Coyotes Howl and Wind Blows Free: Growing Up in the West
Alexandra Russell Haslam, Gerald W. Haslam
University of Nevada Press, 1995.
Includes Funeral Child

Richard Brautigan, a native of Washington, became perhaps the most innovative and admired young American writer of the 1960s and '70s. In books like Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur he helped reinvent how authors viewed and created their worlds. This piece is an excerpt from his autobiography, So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away.

Earth, air, fire & water: poems
selected by Frances McCullough.
New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1989

Flash fiction : very short stories
by James Thomas; Denise Thomas; Tom Hazuka
New York : Norton, 1992