Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington where he spent most of his childhood and teenage years. Sometime in the mid-Fifties Brautigan moved to San Francisco where he published his first volume of poetry. Soon after he wrote some of his most famous novels such as Trout Fishing in America, Sombrero Fallout, A Confederate General from Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar.
As well as five other novels and the collection of short fiction, Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan was an accomplished poet who had nine volumes of poetry published as well as many other short experimental works. Brautigan’s last novel, So the Wind Won’t Blow Away was published in 1982.
He was found dead in 1984, aged 49, beside a bottle of alcohol and a .44 calibre gun.
“Richard Brautigan’s first novel sold less than 800 copies. His next novel sold 4 million copies. Trout Fishing in America turns 50 this year, and while most novels of that age now seem dated, Brautigan’s work seems particularly so: playful, goofy, fragmentary, optimistic. Trout Fishing in America is worth revisiting for exactly its status as an artifact of that time, a book that reveled in language, and made its writer into an imperfect legend.”
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