Born in the Phillipines, Ron Loewinsohn has been a major figure of the San Francisco poetry scene since his student days at San Francisco State College. While there he published his first volume of poetry, Watermelons (1959), which featured an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.

In 1963, he co-edited, with Richard Brautigan, Change, a magazine of poetry.

Trout Fishing in America was dedicated to Jack Spicer and Ron Loewinsohn.

His second book of poetry, The World of the Lie (1963) received the Poets Foundation Award. His later works include Against the Silences to Come (1965), L'Autre (1967), The Step (1968), the collection Meat Air : Poems 1957 - 1969 (1970), and Goat Dances : Poems and Prose (1976).

Loewinsohn is also the author of the novels, Magnetic Fields (1983) and Where all the Ladders Start (1987).

He was a teaching fellow in American Literature at Harvard University, 1968 - 1970, where he took a Ph.D. in 1971. He then returned to California and has since been on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches American literature and creative writing.

Websites

Faculty Profile: Ron Loewinsohn

Interviews

Weber, Cory. An Interview with Ron Loewinsohn Center for Book Culture, 2002. Loewinsohn talks about his book "Magnetic Fields".

Loewinsohn mentions Brautigan in the following articles:

• "After the (mimeograph) Revolution" (TriQuarterly 1970)
• "Brautigan Was A Brilliant Mixer of Dissimilar Images and Ideas" San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle 28 Oct. 1984: B2.
• Brautigan's Wake

"[After his divorce] Richard lived with me for about three months, until we had a fight when we tried to do a magazine together, Change, the Fastest Car on Earth, which lasted only one issue."

Loewinsohn wrote the introduction to the deluxe Arion Press edition of Trout Fishing in America.

"Professor Loewinsohn has written a new introductory essay for this book. It contains a helpful explication of the novel and observations on the life of the author from his intimate knowledge of the writer and his works."

More information about this special edition:
Fishing for Brautigan stories by Heidi Benson San Francisco Chronicle 7 Sept. 2003.

Books by Ron Loewinsohn

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