Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan (January 30 1935 - September 1984) was an American writer.
He was born in Tacoma, Washington and is best known for the works he produced while living in San Francisco in 1960s, where he became Poet-in-Residence at California Institute of Technology in 1967. Richard Brautigan committed suicide in Bolinas, California at the age of forty-nine.
Brautigan's prose and poetry often delt with the tenuous and often impossible relationships a person tries to form with the world. Whether it is by history (A Confederate General from Big Sur), geography and time (The Tokyo-Montana Express), or memory (Sombrero Fallout), Brautigan's gentle protagonist/narrators often find their plans thwarted by the sometimes inexplicable viccitudes of existence. Sometimes solace can be found in either a new love (The Abortion) or just a casual participation in the world (In Watermelon Sugar) which can offer a kind of stability to living.
Brautigan's writings are also characterized a remarkable and often humorous imagination. The permiation of very inventive metaphoric approximations lend even his prose works the feeling of poetry. Brautigan's work became identified with the counterculture youth movement of the late 1960's. Brautigan's eccentirc appearance and manner did not help to dissuade this conception of him and his work but the designation, "hippie author" doesn't seem to fit a writer whose work is so full of melancholy and a preocupation with death and change. The critical backlash of the late 1970s and early 1980s did much to hasten his suicide. Brautigan once wrote, "All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds."
Books:
- Fiction:
- The back cover has the single word: MAYONNAISE in white letters on a solid red background. It is traditional to flirt with women in coffeeshops by showing them the back cover for an instant and then refusing to explain.
- A Confederate General From Big Sur, (1964 ISBN 224619233)
- In Watermelon Sugar, (1968 ASIN 0440340268)
- Revenge of the Lawn, (1970 ISBN 0671209604)
- The Abortion: An Historical Romance, (1971 ISBN 0671208721)
- The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, (1974 ISBN 0671218093)
- Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery, (1975 ISBN 0671220659)
- Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel, (1976 ISBN 0671223313)
- Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942, (1977 ISBN 0440021464)
- The Tokyo-Montana Express, (1980 ISBN 0440087708)
- So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, (1982 ISBN 0395706742)
- An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey, (1982 ISBN 0312277105) not published until 2000
- Poetry:
- The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, 1958
- Lay the Marble Tea, 1959
- The Octopus Frontier, 1960
- All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, 1963
- Please Plant This Book, 1968
- Description 8 seed packets ; 14 x 8 cm. in folder, 18 cm.
- Title from folder.
- "Printed by Graham Mackintosh"--P. [4] of folder.
- A poem is printed on one side of each packet.
- Contents
- Why unknown poets stay unknown, part 1
- The conscripted storyteller
- Would you like to saddle up a couple of goldfish and swim to Alaska?
- The egg hunter
- James Dean in Eugene, Oregon
- A love letter from state insane asylum
- I watched the world glide effortlessly bye
- Somebody from Hemingway Land
- There's always somebody who is enchanted
- The flower burner
- Three experimental dramas
- Why unknown poets stay unknown, part 2
