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Donna Seaman's review of 'Edna Webster'
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The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings

by Donna Seaman?

How fitting it is that the earliest writings of one of the most quirky and enduringly popular voices of the 1960s, Richard Brautigan of Trout Fishing in America fame, emerge in the year that marks the thirtieth anniversaries of Woodstock and the first moon landing. When Brautigan left Eugene, Oregon, for the artistic mecca of San Francisco at age 21 in 1955 he bequeathed to Edna Webster the mother of both of his best buddy and his first girlfriend, a set of blithely agile poems and slyly funny short stories. Webster kept her gift until 1992, when she stunned a rare-book collector by describing her treasure and expressing her interest in selling it, a boon for Brautigan fans. Every selection in this slender volume bespeaks his wry affection for life and his love of literature. Brautigan's debt to e. e. cummings and the Beats is palpable, but so are his unique sense of irony and humor, flair for surrealism, earthiness, and juggler's ease in handling words, traits brought to piquant fruition in his celebrated later works.


The Booklist
September 1, 1999: 56-57.



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