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Richard Brautigan Hip Huck Finn

After 11 years in the literary underground, Richard Brautigan, 35, has finally surfaced as the guru of a growing collegiate cult that grooves not only on his writing but on his life style and his view of humanity as well. Living as closely as possible to nature, he has retained an unfashionably optimistic opinion of mankind since he left his birthplace in Tacoma, Washington, at 19 and wandered down to San Francisco, a city he has haunted ever since. Most of his years there have been spent panhandling while publishing free folios of what he calls "true underground poetry." Brautigan has tacked to a wall in S. F. home a letter from Hubert Humphrey thanking him for a copy of Please Plant This Book, a collection he published early in his career that consisted of eight packets of seeds, each imprinted with a poem and planting instructions. From 1965 to 1968, his total income was under $7000, but it was during this period that Trout Fishing in America - a deceptively titled, outrageously funny amalgam of picaresque autobiography and homey-hip philosophy - was published, and his quiet life was threatened by the resulting acclaim. Trout Fishing and his two other major works — A Confederate General from Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar, both offering more of the same spaced-out ruminations but with somewhat less charm - have sold over 100,000 copies each. A spoken-word LP looms in Brautigan's near future, along with movies based on his novels, and he has read his works everywhere from San Quentin to Harvard. At Harvard, he passed a bottle around and jumped down from the podium and prodded members of the audience to take turns reading. The evening was brought to a close with an impromptu dance by Brautigan and his friends. [See "Richard Brautigan On Saturday Night" by Jeffrey S. Golden for a review of this reading.] So far, however, Brautigan prefers to avoid the limelight - and he refuses to discuss his new-found renown. But he has often said his work speaks for him and the beginning of one of his short stories reads: "It's really something to have fame put its feathery crowbar under your rock, and then upward to the light release you, along with seven grubs and a sow bug."

Playboy
November 1970: 204-205




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