Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington where he spent much of his youth, before moving to San Francisco where he became involved with other writers in the Beat Movement. During the sixties he became one of the most prolific and prominent members of the counter-cultural movement, and wrote some of his most famous novels including Trout Fishing in America, Sombrero Fallout and A Confederate General from Big Sur.
He was found dead in 1984, aged 49, beside a bottle of alcohol and a .44 calibre gun. His daughter, Ianthe Brautigan, has written a biography of her father, You Can’t Catch Death.
“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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