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Identities and Issues in Literature
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Identities and Issues in Literature: Richard Brautigan

by Wesley Britton?

BORN: Tacoma, Washington; January 30, 1935
DIED: Bolinas, California; September, 1984

PRINCIPAL WORKS: A Confederate General from Big Sur, 1964; Trout Fishing in America, 1967; In Watermelon Sugar, 1968; The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1971; Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970, 1971

IDENTITIES: European American

SIGNIFICANT ACHIEVEMENT: A spokesman for youthful disillusionment with American society in the 1960's, Brautigan is remembered for his contributions to literary style.

From 1967 to 1971, Richard Brautigan's popularity was based on his association with West Coast youth movements. His books, particularly his short, fanciful novels, were viewed as expressions of a generation disillusioned with the American myth. His gentle, comic books mourned the apparent loss of the American Eden, and his stories often focus on the search for a new American pastoral utopia. Such a search, his works point out, ultimately results in despair and disillusionment. Brautigan's works comment upon social and personal values in America, linking life and nature. An implicit belief in Brautigan's work is that one cannot find personal happiness in a contaminated, polluted environment.

Critical views differ widely on Brautigan's vision, some emphasizing his apocalyptic, melancholy America, others pointing to his gentle, sweet, optimistic imagery that transcends the hard, workaday world. His use of nature is often compared to that of Henry David Thoreau's Walden(external link) (1854), especially Trout Fishing in America, regarded as Brautigan's best novel. Like Thoreau, Brautigan is considered to be an advocate of the individual conscience rather than the dictates of social laws, a theme explored in all of his early works, perhaps best demonstrated in his The Abortion: An Historical Romance, in which a couple live in a library of unpublished books and in which the woman has, without much guilt or any medical complication, an abortion.

Critics generally agree that Brautigan's prose is more important than his verse, and that earlier, more stylistically innovative writings present his themes more concisely than his later work. Brautigan's canon is widely discussed for his use of metaphorical, whimsical language rather than for any depth of philosophy or meaning. His use of America's past as being both bankrupt of ideas and a necessity for understanding the present, his concern for the fluidity and stability of nature, and his quirky, surreal examinations of social disintegration remain of interest despite his reputation for merely being a spokesman for the revolutionary attitudes of the 1960's.

While continuing to publish after 1971, Brautigan found both his critical and popular support eroding with each successive book. Brautigan apparently committed suicide in September, 1984, but his body was not discovered until October 25 of that year.


Identities and Issues in Literature
Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1997



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