Popularized after its reissue in 1968, Confederate General from Big Sur's portrait of nonconformist life in California was often read as a description of protohippies, a companion piece to Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). But the novel had originally been published in 1964, and its characters and message are antithetical to several concerns of the hippie movement.

Unlike the hippie counterculture that embraced pacifism and based its politics in opposition to the Vietnam War, Confederate General from Big Sur's protagonist Lee Mellon is a brutal and insensitive iconoclast who is unconcerned with the political reality of America. His rebellion is not a conscious reaction against his society as much as it is a simple determination to do what he wants.

Similarly, although the novel portrays a group of young people living together in elective poverty, it is no encomium to communal life. Instead, Brautigan's characters exist in...