Brautigan, Richard (1935-1984)
Author of the widely popular novel Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan was a countercultural hero in the United States in the 1960s. Although he never aligned hi...
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Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, the son of Bernard F. and Lula Mary Keho Brautigan. He married Virginia Dionne Adler, from whom he is now divorced, on 8 June 1957, and he has a daugh...
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Richard Brautigan, a San Francisco-based poet and a popular experimental novelist in the 1960s, left an uncertain critical legacy when he died, apparently by his own hand, at the age of forty-nine. Co...
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Richard Gary Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, on 30 January 1935, the oldest child of Bernard F. Brautigan and Lula Mary Keho Brautigan; his father was a "common laborer," his mother a housew...
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Critical Essay by Philip Rahv
Richard Brautigan's beat-story A Confederate General from Big Sur—strikes me as very crude indeed. In it the beatnik tendency to disorganization of form and...
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Critical Essay by Thomas Lask
"The Abortion," Richard Brautigan's new novel, is split almost evenly down the middle. Half of it is amiable fantasy, half realistic documentary so f...
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Critical Essay by Robert Adams
The Brautigan phenomenon; California filtered through Brautigan, has been working itself out, in prose and verse, for several years now. How far has it got, and where is...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Butwin
Richard Brautigan's novels have taken their place among the standard extra-curricular reading of college students. Their special appeal to the young may lie in B...
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Critical Essay by Michael Feld
[Psychiatrists] doing a roaring trade in rich young ladies who've lost the will to live tip Richard as therapy in an each way double with Christina RossettiȂ...
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Critical Essay by Tony Tanner
[Brautigan's writing seems to float easily away from the dreck of the contemporary environment] like clouds over the Pacific…. Although his work is indeed e...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler
What intrigues us most about Richard Brautigan's novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, is its strong resemblance to [Ernest Hemingway&#...
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Critical Essay by Cheryl Walker
Richard Brautigan is an epiphenomenon in American literature. He seems to represent some sort of insubstantial alternative. While the academy of letters reads Beckett, ...
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Critical Essay by Gilbert Sorrentino
[The Galilee Hitch-Hiker] has nine short poems which take their shape from quotations from Baudelaire, and from the kind of residue in the reader's mind con...
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Critical Essay by John Ditsky
Richard Brautigan's fiction shares many of the qualities of his poetry—charm, brevity, whimsy, and in many cases a total inability to leave a residue in the...
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Critical Essay by Valentine Cunningham
When you take on the surreal you must clearly watch out for its near and merely embarrassing neighbours, triteness and banality. Richard Brautigan is not, on the...
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Critical Essay by Michael Rogers
[The guileless and unprepossessing Brautigan style] has finally, after a few tentative passes, collided firmly with the harsh and nasty seventies.
Brautigan's s...
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Critical Essay by L. J. Davis
It strikes me that the secret of Richard Brautigan's fiction and poetry is that, like the symbolism of D. H. Lawrence, it means exactly what it seems to mean. Tryi...
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Critical Essay by Robert Kern
Brautigan's work in both poetry and prose … provides a post-modernist instance of primitivist poetics in as pure a form as one could wish and also helps to ...
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Critical Essay by Duncan Fallowell
Willard and his Bowling Trophies is a humorous downtown fantasy and might strike someone not au fait with post-colonic literature as unusual, disgusting even. This i...
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Critical Essay by Thomas R. Edwards
As a Barthelme-like exercise in discontinuous modes, lyrical, topical, and confessional, [Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel] is amusing but somehow self-cancelling...
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Critical Essay by Dennis Petticoffer
Brautigan insists that [June 30th, June 30th] is a "different" collection of poetry. Written in diary form, it contains impressions of his seven-week...
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Critical Essay by Mary Hope
As a newcomer to the Brautigan cult, I can only think that [Dreaming of Babylon] must be a bit of a spare-time exercise: an after-dinner conversational joke which got out o...
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Critical Essay by Arian Schuster
[June 30th, June 30th is a] collection of eighty brief poems, several just fragments—written from May 13 to June 30th on a visit Brautigan made to Japan, somewh...
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Critical Essay by Guy Davenport
Mr. Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar are experimental pieces of quite spirited ...
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Critical Essay by J. D. O'hara
[Richard Brautigan, in Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar] is funny but seldom satiric, sometimes bor...
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Critical Essay by Kate Rose
Reading Mr. Brautigan's [Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt], I'm struck by the fact that [he] cannot be aspiring to poetdom as it is commonly conceived these d...
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Critical Essay by Hugo Williams
Though much has been made of [Brautigan's] years in the wilderness, it has fallen to him, as far as his poetry is concerned, to be the popularizer of other men&#...
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In the following essay, Horvath describes the efforts of the countercultural heroes in Brautigan 's fiction as they attempt to resist the dominant culture of American society, associated in Bra...
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In the following brief analysis of “Winter Rug,” Horvath discusses the manner in which the characters come to terms with death.
“Winter Rug,” a story included in Revenge of...
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In the following essay, Horvath examines the ways in which Brautigan's fiction deals with the illusion of cheating death.
Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted that “Death is not an event in li...
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In the following essay, Abbott discusses the critical neglect of Brautigan's work and attempts a reevaluation of his skill at dialogue and narrative.
“What I desired to do in marble, I c...
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In the following essay, Blakely analyzes the narrative technique in one Brautigan novel, asserting that Brautigan has more literary worth than many critics have admitted.
Richard Brautigan, one among ...
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In the following essay, Pietralunga compares Brautigan's Confederate General from Big Sur to some of the work of its Italian translator, finding biographical and literary similarities between t...
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In the following essay, Hume analyzes the aesthetics of Brautigan's narratives, noting that he consciously used Zen principles to evoke a special kind of reader response.
Richard Brautigan�...
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Brautigan, Richard (1935-1984)
Richard (Gary) Brautigan
