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A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers: Richard Brautigan

By the late 1960s Brautigan had achieved controversial recognition as the hippie spokesman of that era. He was vigorously celebrated or damned, according to varying opinion on the social phenomenon he was supposed to be expressing: the bittersweetness of the American Dream as seen through the eyes of a disillusioned but reasonably good-humoured San Francisco "flower child."

His influence were Imagists, Japanese aesthetics and the French Symbolists, who inspired his use of synesthesia. From the Romantic poets he took his major theme of the transforming power of the imagination, particularly that of the artist. His plots are bizarre, often devoid of dramatic action, while his analogies and images come from unrelated ordinary objects which when linked become astonishing. The surreal, language-distorting, snapshot-like elements of his writing led some to consider him the literary equivalent of the drug experience, while many of his older readers hoped he would provide some insight into the youth culture.

In his later work he revealed a blacker humour and a brooding, melancholic narrator, depressed at growing old.

It is said of Brautigan that he never cared about the critics but was broken-hearted at the loss of his readers, and it is still argued as to whether or not he ranks as a "minor novelist", or was just a fad of the 1960s.

A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers.
Peter Parker, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 102.



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