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 housewife. On 8 June, 1957, he married Virginia Dionne Adler in Reno, Nevada; their daughter, Ianthe, was born on 25 March 1960; the Brautigans were divorced on 28 July 1970 in San Francisco. In 1967 he was poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, though he had never gone to college himself. In 1968 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Brautigan does not volunteer biographical information, and though his stories often seem to have, along with their fantasy, many autobiographical details, he obviously invents freely. In an interview he states that he wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because he wanted to write novels and figured that he could not write a novel until...