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. Commentators have variously attempted to categorize him as “the last Beat,” a Zen Buddhist, a hippie icon, an American humorist, a modern Henry David Thoreau, and a pioneer of postmodern fiction. Although Brautigan enjoyed a generally favorable critical and commercial response to his experimental fiction in the 1960s, reviewers often panned his work as formally simplistic and conceptually light. Following a popular breakthrough with Trout Fishing in America (1967) and other works, Brautigan slipped out of fashion in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many critics dismissed his later fiction and poetry as self-absorbed, empty productions of a flower child whose moment had passed. While some critics found a subtle complexity and artistic purpose in Brautigan's seemingly...