RICHARD BRAUTIGAN Biography - Writers

 
 

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RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

Richard Brautigan (January 30, 1935 - September 1984) was an American writer.         
                                                                                       
He was born in Tacoma, Washington and is best known for the works he produced         
while living in San Francisco in 1960s, where he became Poet-in-Residence at           
California Institute of Technology in 1967.                                           
Richard Brautigan committed suicide in Bolinas, California at the age of forty-nine.   
                                                                                       
Brautigan's prose and poetry often delt with the tenuous and often impossible         
relationships a person tries to form with the world. Whether it is by history (A       
Confederate General from Big Sur), geography and time (The Tokyo-Montana Express),     
or memory (Sombrero Fallout), Brautigan's gentle protagonist/narrators often           
find their plans thwarted by the sometimes inexplicable vicissitudes of               
existence. Sometimes solace can be found in either a new love (The Abortion) or       
just a casual participation in the world (In Watermelon Sugar) which can offer a       
kind of stability to living.                                                           
                                                                                       
Brautigan's writings are also characterized a remarkable and often humorous           
imagination. The permiation of very inventive metaphoric approximations lend           
even his prose works the feeling of poetry. Brautigan's work became identified         
with the counterculture youth movement of the late 1960's. Brautigan's eccentirc       
appearance and manner did not help to dissuade this conception of him and his         
work but the designation, "hippie author" doesn't seem to fit a writer whose           
work is so full of melancholy and a preoccupation with death and change. The           
critical backlash of the late 1970s and early 1980s did much to hasten his             
suicide. Brautigan once wrote, "All of us have a place in history. Mine is             
clouds."                                                                               
Biography by: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License       
and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on           
Richard Brautigan.