Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 – around September 16, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. He wrote books his whole life and published ten novels, two collections of short stories, and ten poetry books. His books were published in the United States and in countries like Europe, Japan, and China. He is best known for his novels Trout Fishing in America (1967), In Watermelon Sugar (1968), and The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971).
Early life
Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, as the only child of Bernard Frederick "Ben" Brautigan Jr. (July 29, 1908 – May 27, 1994), a factory worker, and Lulu Mary "Mary Lou" Keho (April 7, 1911 – September 24, 2005), a waitress. In May 1934, eight months before Richard was born, Bernard and Mary Lou separated.
Richard said he met his biological father only twice. After Richard’s death, Bernard did not know he had a son, saying, "He has the same last name, but why would they wait 45 to 50 years to tell me I have a son?"
In 1938, Richard and his mother began living with Arthur Martin Titland. Titland and Mary Lou had a daughter, Barbara Ann, born on May 1, 1939, in Tacoma. Richard described a difficult experience when, at age nine, his mother left him and his four-year-old sister alone in a motel room in Great Falls, Montana, for two days.
On January 20, 1943, Mary Lou married fry cook Robert Geoffrey Porterfield. The couple had a daughter named Sandra Jean, born on April 1, 1945, in Salem, Oregon. Mary Lou told Richard that Porterfield was his biological father, and Richard began using the name Richard Gary Porterfield.
Mary Lou separated from Porterfield in 1946. She married William David Folston Sr. on June 12, 1950. The couple had a son named William David Jr., born on December 19, 1950, in Eugene. Richard said Folston was a violent alcoholic who abused his mother.
Richard grew up in poverty. He shared stories about his mother removing rat feces from flour before making pancakes. His family struggled to find food and sometimes went without meals for days. They relied on welfare and moved across the Pacific Northwest for nine years before settling in Eugene, Oregon, in August 1944.
Richard began writing poems and stories as early as age 12. His novel So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away (1982) includes events from his childhood, such as accidentally shooting a friend’s brother in the ear.
On September 12, 1950, Richard enrolled at South Eugene High School. He wrote for the school newspaper and played basketball. He was 6 feet 4 inches tall when he graduated. His first published poem, "The Light," appeared in the school newspaper on December 19, 1952. He graduated with honors on June 9, 1953.
After high school, Richard lived with his best friend Peter Webster and Peter’s mother, Edna Webster, who cared for him like a mother. He stayed with the Websters for about a year before moving to San Francisco in August 1954. He returned to Oregon several times due to financial difficulties.
On December 14, 1955, Richard was arrested for throwing a rock through a police station window. He was fined $25 for disorderly conduct and sent to the Oregon State Hospital on December 24, 1955, after showing signs of erratic behavior.
At the hospital, Richard was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression. He received electroconvulsive therapy 12 times. During his stay, he wrote The God of the Martians, a manuscript of 20 short chapters totaling 600 words. The manuscript was rejected by editors and remains unpublished. A copy was later found in the papers of one of the editors, Harry Hooton, after 1961.
On February 19, 1956, Richard was released from the hospital and briefly lived with his mother, stepfather, and siblings in Eugene. He moved to San Francisco, where he spent most of his life, except for time in Tokyo and Montana.
Career
In San Francisco, Richard Brautigan tried to become a writer. He gave out his poetry on the streets and performed at poetry clubs. In early 1956, Brautigan typed a three-page manuscript and sent it to Macmillan Inc. for publication. The manuscript had two pages with 14 poems and one page with the dedication "for Linda." Only two poems, "stars" and "hey," had titles. On May 10, 1956, Macmillan rejected the manuscript, saying, "… there is no place where it will fit in." In 2005, the X-Ray Book Company published the manuscript as a chapbook titled Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes.
Brautigan's first poetry book was The Return of the Rivers (1957), which contained only one poem. He later published two more poetry collections: The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958) and Lay the Marble Tea (1959). During the 1960s, Brautigan became part of the growing San Francisco counterculture scene. He performed at concerts and joined groups like The Diggers. He also wrote short pieces for The Communication Company to use as broadsides. Brautigan was a writer for Change, an underground newspaper created by Ron Loewinsohn.
In the summer of 1961, while camping in southern Idaho with his wife and daughter Ianthe, Brautigan finished writing two novels: A Confederate General from Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America. A Confederate General from Big Sur was his first novel, published in 1964, but it received little attention.
However, when Trout Fishing in America was published in 1967, Brautigan became very famous worldwide. Literary critics said he was the writer most connected to the countercultural youth movement of the late 1960s, even though he did not like hippies. Trout Fishing in America has sold over 4 million copies worldwide.
With his earnings, Brautigan bought a house in Bolinas and a ranch in Montana. He and his wife separated when their daughter was two, and Ianthe lived mostly with him until she married.
During the 1960s, Brautigan published four poetry collections and another novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968). In the spring of 1967, he was Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology. That year, his chapbook All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was published by The Communication Company. It was printed in an edition of 1,500 copies and given away for free.
From 1968 to 1970, Brautigan had 23 short pieces published in Rolling Stone magazine. From late 1968 to February 1969, Brautigan recorded a spoken-word album for The Beatles' short-lived record label, Zapple. The label was closed by Allen Klein before the recording could be released. It was later released in 1970 on Harvest Records as Listening to Richard Brautigan.
In the 1970s, Brautigan tried different types of writing. He published five novels (the first, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, was written in the mid-1960s) and a collection of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn (1971). In 1974, The Cowell Press collected seven of his broadside poems into the book Seven Watermelon Suns. A limited edition of ten copies included embossed color etchings by Ellen Meske.
"When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water," said his friend and fellow writer, Thomas McGuane. "He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy." As literary critics ignored his work and readers stopped supporting him, Brautigan's popularity declined in the late 1970s and 1980s. His work remained popular in Europe and Japan, where he visited several times.
Some critics said Brautigan was naive. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, "As an editor, I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people."
Brautigan's writings are known for a creative and humorous imagination. He used many inventive metaphors, making his prose feel like poetry. Themes from Zen Buddhism, such as the balance between past and future and the temporary nature of the present, also appear in his work. Brautigan's last publication before his death in 1984 was his novel So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982).
The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings was published in 1999. In 1955, when Brautigan was twenty-one, he gave this collection of writings to Edna Webster when he left Oregon for San Francisco.
In 2002, a planned edition of Brautigan's collected poems was rejected by his estate. In November 2016, the French publisher Le Castor Astral published a bilingual edition titled Tout ce que j'ai à déclarer: œuvre poétique complète.
Personal life
On June 8, 1957, Brautigan married Virginia Dionne Alder in Reno, Nevada. The couple had one daughter together, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, born on March 25, 1960, in San Francisco. Brautigan’s alcoholism and depression made him more abusive over time. Alder ended the relationship on December 24, 1962, but the divorce was not completed until July 28, 1970. After the separation, Brautigan lived in San Francisco, while Alder moved to Manoa, Hawaii, and became a feminist and an anti-Vietnam War activist.
Brautigan married again on December 1, 1977, to Akiko Yoshimura, a woman born in Japan. He met her in July 1976 while living in Tokyo. The couple lived in Pine Creek, Park County, Montana, for two years. Brautigan and Yoshimura divorced in 1980.
Brautigan had a relationship with Marcia Clay of San Francisco from 1981 to 1982. He also had a short relationship with Janice Meissner, a woman from the North Beach community of San Francisco. Other relationships included Marcia Pacaud, who appears on the cover of The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; Valerie Estes, who appears on the cover of Listening to Richard Brautigan; and Sherry Vetter, who appears on the cover of Revenge of the Lawn.
Brautigan struggled with alcoholism throughout his adult life. According to his daughter, he often talked about suicide over a period of more than 10 years before ending his life.
Death
In 1984, when he was 49 years old, Richard Brautigan moved to Bolinas, California. He lived alone in a large, old house that he had purchased with money he earned earlier in his life. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head using a .44 Magnum gun. His body, which had begun to decompose, was discovered by David Fechheimer, a friend and private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, near a large window that overlooked the Pacific Ocean, though trees blocked the view. Because the body was decomposed, it is believed that Brautigan may have died more than a month earlier, on September 16, 1984, shortly after speaking with a friend named Marcia Clay on the telephone. Neighbors heard a loud noise on that Sunday while watching an NFL game. Brautigan was survived by his parents, both of his former wives, and his daughter, Ianthe.
According to Michael Caines, who wrote about this in The Times Literary Supplement, the story that Brautigan left a suicide note that said, "Messy, isn't it?" is not true. Ianthe Brautigan has confirmed that her father did not leave such a message.
Legacy
Because Richard Brautigan often wrote from his own perspective and included places and events connected to his life, some readers may think his work is based on his own experiences. In 1972, Terrence Malley, a professor at Long Island University, wrote that "Brautigan's books are mostly directly based on his life but also hard to understand fully … It is usually hard to tell where personal stories end and playful ideas begin in Brautigan's writing" (18).
Many writers who came after Brautigan have said he influenced their work, including Haruki Murakami, W. P. Kinsella, Christopher Moore, and Sarah Hall.
In his novel The Abortion, Brautigan imagined a library for unpublished works. This library, called the Brautigan Library, was located in Burlington, Vermont, until 1995, when it moved to the nearby Fletcher Free Library. It stayed there until 2005. Although plans were made to move it to the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library, these plans did not happen. In 2010, the library was moved to the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Washington, after an agreement between Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe Brautigan, and the museum.
The industrial rock band Machines of Loving Grace was named after one of Brautigan's poems. The 1992 EP Boo! Forever by the alternative rock band The Boo Radleys and the 2014 album Boo, Forever by the indie rock band Field Guides both use the same title as one of Brautigan's poems.
In March 1994, a teenager named Peter Eastman Jr. from Carpinteria, California, legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. He now teaches English at Waseda University in Japan.
In March 2018, poet Francis Daulerio published Please Plant This Book, a new version of Brautigan's book of the same name to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The book included seeds to plant, along with poems by Daulerio and illustrations by Scott Hutchison. Money from the book was given to The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Scott Hutchison passed away in May 2018. In September 2018, an expanded version of the book was published as a chapbook. This version included a foreword by Ianthe Brautigan and an afterword by Scottish poet Michael Pedersen. The original edition sold out quickly.
The music video for Kat Meoz's song "Here I Wait," directed by Kansas Bowling, copies the covers of Brautigan's books and includes the only known footage of Willard, the real person who inspired Brautigan's book Willard and His Bowling Trophies.
The documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, created by Adam Curtis, was named after one of Brautigan's poems.