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The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives: Richard Gary Brautigan

by Ingrid Sterner?

Richard Brautigan spent much of his childhood, which was marked by poverty, in Tacoma, Washington, other parts of the Pacific Northwest, and Montana. His mother, Lula Mary Keho, was a homemaker, and his father, Bernard F. Brautigan, was a common laborer who left his wife when she was pregnant with Richard. He had one younger sister, as well as a series of stepfathers while he was growing up. Brautigan did not attend college.

A tall, slim man with thick wire-rim glasses and sandy-blond longish hair, Brautigan in 1954 moved to San Francisco, the destination of many of the disaffected youth of his generation, and became involved in the Beat literary movement. While he had many of the same affinities as the members of the movement, such as an aversion to middle-class values, commercialism, and conformity, and an interest in mysticism and Zen Buddhism, he was never really a part of the group and is usually not classified by literary taxonomists as such. On 8 June 1957 he married Virginia Dionne Adler; they had one daughter, Ianthe. The couple divorced in July 1970.

In 1966 and 1967 Brautigan was poet-in-residence at the California Insitute of Technology. In 1968, the year after Trout Fishing in America was published, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1972 Brautigan left San Francisco and later bought a small ranch near Livingston, Montana. This move initiated an eight-year period during which Brautigan, who was capable of being intensely private and inward, largely shunned opportunities to give lectures at universities and refused all invitations to be interviewed. in 1976 he made his first trip to Japan, where he lived of and on until 1984. He married a Japanese woman named Akiko in 1978; that marriage, which was childless, ended in divorce in 1980.

In 1978 Brautigan's works became the center of a book-banning controversy in a northern California high school. The American Civil Liberties Union and his publisher, Delacorte Press, rallied behind students and teachers in a suit against the Shasta County school board after several of Brautigan's books were removed from the classroom. The case was decided in Brautigan's favor.

At the annual Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco in December 1979, Brautigan appeared on a panel titled "Zen and Contemporary Poetry" with the poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Robert Bly?, and Lucien Stryk? to discuss he importance of Zen Buddhism to American literature. Brautigan was an instructor at Montana State University in Bozeman in 1982. The exact date of his death is not known. On 25 October 1984 his badly decomposed body was discovered at his home in Bolinas, California, twenty miles north of San Francisco; he had shot himself in the head with a Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum four to five weeks earlier.

Brautigan began his literary career as a poet but met with little success in that genre. His first poem to be published was titled "The Second Kingdom" (Epos, winter 1956). This was followed by several slim volumes of poetry, all published by small presses. Perhaps the most notable aspect of Brautigan's early poetry career was his participation in a volume titled Please Plant This Book (around 1968), which contained eight poems, all printed on the backs of seed packets that included full instructions for planting on the fronts. Other volumes of poetry include The Return of the Rivers (1957), The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958), Lay the Marble Tea (1959), The Octopus Frontier (1960), All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (1967), The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt (1970), Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976), and June 30th, June 30th (1978).

The title page of Brautigan's most famous, and arguably best, novel, Trout Fishing in America, features a telling typographical image: the novel's title appears in the shape of a hook. Most obviously, the design resonates with the idea of fishing expressed in the title, but it also conveys some sense of the book's ability to catch the imagination of American readers. Between 1967 and 1972 some 2,000 copies of the book were sold while it was still only available through a small, independent San Francisco-based publishing house called the Four Seasons Foundation. Despite its initially low sales, by 1970 the book had so touched the imagination of a generation that its title had become the namesake of a commune, a free school, and an underground newspaper, perhaps as much an indication of its popularity as of the general temper of the times. (Not a few sporting goods stores unwittingly stocked the novel and sold it to equally unsuspecting customers.)

Brautigan has been alternately classified as a beat, a hippie, and, more generically, a spokesman for the counterculture. But all of these labels seem unnecessarily limiting. In Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan creates his vision of America through a series of vignettes that range over a wide geographical, historical, and literary landscape. This vision is hardly one of complacent acceptance or rosy optimism. Rather it is one of recurrent disappointment, in which expectations, in terms both of society and of the confrontation between the imagination and reality, are repeatedly unfulfilled. Yet this pessimism does not lead to moreseness; in fact, a large part of the power and appeal of the novel (or "Brautigan," as one contemporary critic dubbed his difficult-to-classify-works) derives from its subtle humor, which Brautigan expresses through felicitous turns of phrase and unexpected metaphors. The very title of the novel takes on an amorphous quality, appearing at various times throughout the book as an activity, a character, a place, a spirit, an imaginative construct. The slipperiness of this protean phrase suggests Brautigan's sense of the difficulty of defining the effect of America on the imagination.

Brautigan's other fiction includes A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Revenge of the Lawn: Stories, 1962-1970 (1971), The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971), The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1974), Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942 (1977), The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980), and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982).


The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives Volume One: 1981-1985. Ed. Kenneth T. Jackson. New York: Charles Scribner, 1998. 97-98.



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