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Kurt Vonnegut's tribute to Brautigan
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A Tribute

by Kurt Vonnegut?

I never knew Richard Brautigan, except through his writings, which were brought to my attention by my students at Harvard, where I was a lecturer in 1971. He was then published by City Lights. I commended him to my own publisher, Seymour Lawrence, who subsequently gained him a much wider audience, thanks to the sales force and mass distribution capabilities of Dell. We never met or corresponded or spoke on the telephone.

For what it is worth, which is probably nothing: there was publishing gossip that he entered the world of mass marketing with declarations of not being interested in money, but that he later became a shrewd bargainer.

At this great distance from the man himself, I will guess that he, like so many other good writers, was finally done in by the chemical imbalance we call depression, which does its deadly work regardless of what may really be going on in the sufferer's love life or his adventures, for good or ill, in the heartless marketplace.


Dictionary of Literary Biography? Yearbook: 1984
Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985



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