Certain creative types made names for themselves in post-war America as rebels against the status quo. With all-American war hero Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, these cultural expatriates discovered each other in San Francisco or New York’s Greenwich Village, experimented with drugs and alternative lifestyles — and sometimes published works of great renown. Here are a few of these legends of the American counterculture.
JACK KEROUAC‘s 1957 book On the Road remains a counterculture cornerstone. Kerouac typed the novel during three marathon weeks in 1951, then struggled for six years to get it published. The book recounts Kerouac’s cross-country ramble with fellow drifter Neal Cassady and their encounters with hobos, junkies and other mainstream dropouts. The manuscript for On the Road, typed onto strips of paper pasted together into one long scroll, was sold at auction in May 2001 for $2.2 million.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author KEN KESEY also traveled cross-country with Neal Cassady. In 1964 the two men and other “Merry Pranksters” boarded an old schoolbus painted in psychedelic colors and drove from California to New York to celebrate the publication of Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. They named the bus Further and along the way they made friends, threw parties, performed impromptu rock concerts and experimented with LSD. The trip was immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Ken Kesey was a fan and patron of a San Francisco band called The Warlocks. The band was later renamed the Grateful Dead and its leader, JERRY GARCIA, became an enduring star. As years went by the Grateful Dead’s perpetual concert tours (featuring Garcia’s famously long-winded guitar solos) became a magnet for aging hippies and for youngsters who wanted to relive the tie-dyed splendor of the 1960s. By Garcia’s death in 1995, the Grateful Dead had somehow made the counterculture into big business, ranking annually as one of the world’s top-grossing concert acts.
TIMOTHY LEARY coined one of the best-remembered phrases of the 1960s: “Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.” As a psychologist working at Harvard, Leary studied LSD’s effect on volunteers; after the drug was made illegal he continued to publicly celebrate its mind-altering effects. Leary was arrested in 1972 for possession of marijuana and briefly fled the country, but by then he had become so famous for his radical views that President Richard M. Nixon had called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN made his literary reputation in San Francisco in the 1960s with poems, short stories and novels.Trout Fishing in America, his satirical look at the condition of the environment, was written in 1961, but not published until 1967. It became a national bestseller and a manifesto of sorts across college campuses, and assured Brautigan a place in literature amid the Beats and the Hippies. His other works include the novels A Confederate General From Big Sur (1964) and In Watermelon Sugar (1968), four volumes of poetry and a short story collection, Revenge of the Lawn: Stories, 1962-1970 (1971).
EDWARD ABBEY grew up on a Pennsylvania farm and studied at the University of New Mexico before going to work for the National Park Service. In his nonfiction account of his time in Utah, Abbey reflected on the beauty of the desert and the damage done to it by humans. The book, Desert Solitaire, was published in 1968 and eventually became an honored guide for the environmental movement. His other best known work is the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), a rallying cry for activists who abhor the negative effects of industrialization.
Jean-Louis “Jack” Lebris de Kerouac (play /ˈkɛruːæk/ or /ˈkɛrɵæk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. His writings have inspired other writers, including Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Eddie Vedder, Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, Lester Bangs, Tom Robbins and Will Clarke. Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the Hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward it. In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-standing abuse of alcohol. Since his death Kerouac’s literary prestige has grown and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, among them: On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody and Big Sur.
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN -HIS LIFE-HIS BIOGRAPHY,A READING AND POEMS
The Brautigan PagesPosted by jen. Sponsor a Poet Page | Much of the information regarding Richard Brautigan’s life and death is uncertain. He was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington. His father left home before he was born, and his childhood was apparently a troubled one marked by poverty. He did not attend college. At some point in the mid-1950s, he left home for San Francisco, where he became involved in the Beat scene. In 1957, Brautigan married Virginia Dionne Adler, the mother of his only child, Ianthe. (They would divorce in 1970.) Although Brautigan, whose work largely defies classification, is not properly considered a Beat writer, he shared the Beats’ aversion to middle class values, commercialism, and conformity. Brautigan’s success as a poet was marginal. He published several slim volumes, all with small presses, but none of these received much recognition. It wasn’t until the publication of Trout Fishing in America (1967), which many consider his best novel, that Brautigan caught the public’s attention and was transformed into a cult hero. By 1970, Trout Fishing in America had become the namesake of a commune, a free school, and an underground newspaper. In 1972, Brautigan withdrew from the public eye and went to live on in a small home in Bolinas, California. In the eight years that followed, he only rarely accepted invitations to lecture and consistently declined to be interviewed. In 1976, he made his first trip to Japan, where he lived off-and-on until his death. There he met Akiko, whom he married in 1978; the marriage failed, and they were divorced two years later. During the year of 1982, Brautigan taught at Montana State University in Bozeman. He then withdrew again. In October of 1984, his body was discovered at his home; he had shot himself in the head some four or five weeks earlier. Richard Brautigan’s poetry collections include June 30th, June 30th (Delacorte, 1978), Loading Mercy with a Pitchfork (1975), Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt (1970), The San Francisco Weather Report (1969), and Please Plant This Book (eight poems printed on separate seed packet envelopes, 1968). His novels include The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980), Willard and his Bowling Trophies (1975), In Watermelon Sugar (1967), and A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964). Brautigan’s last novel was recently discovered and published posthumously, under the title An Unfortunate Woman (Rebel Inc., 2000). A Selected Bibliography Poetry June 30th, June 30th (1978) Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976) Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt (1970) The Octopus Frontier (1960) The Return of the Rivers (1957) Prose Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1975) In Watermelon Sugar (1967) Trout Fishing in America (1967) A Confederate General From Big Sur (1964 – See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/678#sthash.CI1wcSPh.dpuf
Subscribe Now
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN INTERVIEW AND POETRY
Books of The Times
In Pursuit of Pleasure and Trout
Richard Brautigan Biography, ‘Jubilee Hitchhiker’
Vernon Merritt III/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Richard Brautigan
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: May 22, 2012
For a committed sensualist and prototypical hippie, a man who wore floppy hats, granny glasses, love beads and a droopy mustache that made him look like General Custer at an acid test, Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) had a potent work ethic.
JUBILEE HITCHHIKER
The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan
By William Hjortsberg
Illustrated. 852 pages. Counterpoint. $42.50.
Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
Janie Camp
William Hjortsberg
He wrote nearly every morning, regardless of keening hangovers. He spent the rest of the day, William Hjortsberg notes in “Jubilee Hitchhiker,” his sprawling and definitive new biography of this most offbeat of American writers, “in pursuit of happiness.” Happiness for Brautigan usually meant, to borrow the title of an undervalued W. M. Spackman novel, an armful of warm girl. In San Francisco, where he mostly lived, and elsewhere, he had groupies and would hit on “anything that wasn’t nailed down,” one friend commented. He put some of his favorite bohemian cuties on the front of his books. “Richard’s sexual archive,” another friend said, “is reflected on his book covers.” Happiness meant seeing plenty of movies. Once he began making money, in the early 1970s, it also meant good food (oysters, pork buns, the most expensive lobsters at The Palm steakhouse) and guns, which, when drunk, he would frequently discharge indoors. Brautigan and the film director Sam Peckinpah, a friend, once opened fire with a .357 Magnum and a .38 Colt at an alley cat through an open hotel room window.
Brautigan’s signal pleasure, though, from the time he was a young boy, growing up poor in a broken family in Tacoma, Wash., until the end of his life, was trout fishing. It was an obsession that fed his first and probably best novel, “Trout Fishing in America,” written in 1961 but not issued by a major publishing house until 1969.
Generations of anglers have picked up “Trout Fishing in America” based on its title alone, expecting a how-to volume. What they get instead is akin to a gentle tab of LSD: an eccentric and slyly profound novel, seemingly narrated by the ghost of trout fishing past and filled with surreal post-“Walden” visions like a dismembered trout stream for sale at a junkyard.
Brautigan wrote his best novels — “Trout Fishing in America,” “A Confederate General From Big Sur” (1964), “In Watermelon Sugar” (1968) and “The Abortion” (1971) — and books of poetry, notably “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster” (1968) before fame swamped him in the early ’70s, when he was in his mid-to-late 30s.
He got rich suddenly and enjoyed himself vastly. His writing got woolier and worse, however, and the critics turned on him. He spent most of the money. His looks began to go. (One of his best-known poems is titled “My Nose Is Growing Old.”) Neurotic and increasingly in debt, he committed suicide with a handgun in 1984, at 49.
Critics have clashed over the merits of even his best stuff, many agreeing with Jonathan Yardley, who said that Brautigan was “the Love Generation’s answer to Charlie Schultz. Happiness is a warm hippie.” But the novelist Thomas McGuane, later to become a close friend, reviewed an omnibus edition of his early work with admiration in The New York Times Book Review. In a letter, the critic Malcolm Cowley called Brautigan’s poems, “pensées, like grasshoppers in flight.”
In this overly long but involving new biography, Mr. Hjortsberg, a novelist who was a friend and neighbor of Brautigan’s during his Montana years, nails the qualities that I’ve admired about Brautigan’s work, notably his “easy offhand voice, his concern for average working-class people, his matter-of-fact treatment of death, and his often startling juxtaposition of wildly disparate images.”
One of the merits of “Jubilee Hitchhiker” is that it not only tracks Brautigan’s life but also deftly flips open any number of worlds, from the Beat and counterculture scenes in San Francisco to gonzo times in Montana with writers like Mr. McGuane and Jim Harrison, and wildcats like Warren Zevon, Rip Torn, Jeff Bridges, Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton.
Brautigan was essentially a loner, but he had a Zelig-like quality and seemed to know everyone and go everywhere. He drank heavily in Western bars with the young Jimmy Buffett. He shot basketball and tore up money (a long story) with Jack Nicholson. He had an impromptu pasta sauce cook-off with Francis Ford Coppola. He drunkenly pointed a rifle at Wim Wenders, who had mildly criticized the translation in one of Brautigan’s German editions. Janis Joplin wanted him to name her new band.
Bored at a party one night, he hurled a brick through a window, a typical Brautigan performance. When the host screamed at him, he replied, “I don’t want things to be predictable.”
Brautigan and his three siblings grew up in and around Tacoma, Wash., (and later, Eugene, Ore.); his mother worked as a cashier, among other jobs. He never knew his father.He was a tall, shy, pale kid, a Boo Radley whom few at his high school paid attention to. He knew from a young age he wanted to write, but didn’t attend college.
When Brautigan was 20, sick with unrequited love for a girl named Linda, he wandered into a police station and asked to be arrested. To make sure he was, he threw a rock through a glass panel. He ended up in a mental institution, receiving electroshock therapy 12 times.
A year later, in 1956, Brautigan made his way to San Francisco, falling in with a scene that included the poets Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder. Allen Ginsberg didn’t like Brautigan, nicknaming him Frood. Brautigan was livid when the publicity material for his novel “A Confederate General From Big Sur” linked him with the Beats.
He slowly developed his literary style and cultivated his look. By the mid-’60s he was a San Francisco celebrity. He printed poems on seed packets and gave them away in a collection titled “Please Plant This Book.” He appeared regularly in Herb Caen’s popular San Francisco Chronicle newspaper column. In the late 1960s he published some two dozen short stories in his friend Jann Wenner’s new magazine, Rolling Stone.
Brautigan went national in 1969, when Delacorte Press published “Trout Fishing in America,” “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster” and “In Watermelon Sugar” in one volume. Before long he dearly wished to shed his whimsical image.
He never could. When he got drunk and said something cruel about Mr. McGuane in public at a party, the author writes, Mr. McGuane spat back, “You’re nothing but a pet rock.” He then called Brautigan a “hula hoop” and concluded, “You should get down on your knees every day and thank God for creating hippies!”
Brautigan was a generous man who had a dark side. He was prone to anger and jealousy. He married twice but was never faithful for long. He was sexist, even for his time. He had a bondage fetish that spooked some women. He wrote a comic poem about venereal disease, but his own recurring bouts of herpes weren’t funny at all.
This jumbo-size biography is perhaps an odd tribute to a writer whose books were tiny, like small sachets of fragrant rice. It’s on the Robert Caro side of things. It’s total overkill. But it’s an enjoyable soak in American literary bohemia, and a cleareyed portrait of a man whom Mr. Hjortsberg aptly calls “a connoisseur of the perfect moment.” His book is full of them.
30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love
by Richard Brautigan
Thinking hard about you
I got on the bus
and paid 30 cents car fare
and asked the driver for two transfers
before discovering
that I was
alone.
The Beautiful Poem
by Richard Brautigan
I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.
Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.
Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.
3 A.M.
January 15, 1967
San Francisco
by Richard Brautigan
This poem was found written on a paper bag by Richard
Brautigan in a laundromat in San Francisco. The author is unknown.
By accident, you put
Your money in my
Machine (#4)
By accident, I put
My money in another
Machine (#6)
On purpose, I put
Your clothes in the
Empty machine full
Of water and no
Clothes
It was lonely.
Deer Tracks
Beautiful, sobbing
high-geared ****
and then to lie silently
like deer tracks in the
freshly-fallen snow beside
the one you love.
That’s all.
Love Poem
by Richard Brautigan
It’s so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them when you don’t love them any more.
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN WAS another member of the Beat scene of San Francisco in the fifties and is often considered a bridge between the decades. He became, with the publication of Trout Fishing in America, one of the most popular of the counterculture writers of the sixties. He is often thought of as a modern Thoreau; his love of nature and his concern for the environment are recurring themes in his works‚in one sequence he writes of sections of a trout stream being sold in a junkyard for $6.50 per foot. Written in 1961, Trout Fishing in America was finally published by the small Four Seasons Foundation in 1967, and was so popular that many of the communes that sprang up around the country were named after the novel. Thousands of copies of Trout Fishing in America were ordered for sporting goods stores in the mistaken belief that the book was about the subtle art of angling. Richard Brautigan died in 1984, an apparent suicide.
THOUGH RICHARD FARINA died young and his literary output was minimal, he was a larger-than-life figure whose writings and exploits entrenched him in the mythology of the sixties. Farina was of Irish and Cuban heritage; in the fifties he fought both with the Irish Republican Army in Ireland and Fidel Castro in the mountains of Cuba. He attended Cornell University, where Thomas Pynchon was his friend and roommate. Pynchon writes of the novel, “It’s been a while since I’ve read anything quite so groovy, quite such a joy from beginning to end.” Richard Farina died at the age of thirty in a motorcycle accident on his way to a publication party for this book.
JUST AS HE did for the Beat era, Allen Ginsberg, perhaps more than any other figure, helped to define and shape the aesthetics of the psychedelic sixties. He was one of the earliest experimenters with hallucinogenic drugs, having taken psilocybin mushrooms with Timothy Leary in 1960; he traveled in India, Nepal, and Japan, to study Eastern religions; his association with Bob Dylan purportedly helped transform Dylan from a one-dimensional protest singer into a modern poetic genius; and his participation in virtually every counterculture event from war protests to the various Love Ins, Acid Tests, and musical festivals made him one of the most influential figures of the era. T.V. Baby Poems is one of his many publications from the sixties.
TROPIC OF CANCER and Naked Lunch had challenged literary censorship in America, but there would be many more in the new era of freedom of speech. Michael McClure was an integral member of the Beat scene in San Francisco in the fifties, (see page 31), and he segued easily into the new Psychedelic Era that was beginning to coalesce in San Francisco in the sixties. The Beard brought to the stage a raw, explicit look at sex, violence, and conventional morality, exploring a relationship between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow in the afterlife. Performed in San Francisco in 1968, the cast members were arrested and jailed on fourteen consecutive nights, due to their depiction of simulated sex in the third act. Michael McClure continues to write plays, novels, and books of poetry.
TERRY SOUTHERN GAINED renown in the early sixties as a writer of controversial novels and screenplays. Candy, published in 1958 was one of the few novels in English ever banned in France on grounds of indecency, and The Magic Christian, published in 1960, was a brilliant, dark satire that Lenny Bruce called, “the funniest book I’ve ever read.” Stanley Kubrick tapped Southern to work on Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the bomb, a movie that film historian Robert Sklar said, “satirized the cold-war mentality and helped lay the groundwork for the 1960s counterculture.” Southern later collaborated with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on Easy Rider, a movie that became an instant counterculture classic.
EVERY SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL movement needs a newspaper and the Oracle became the most important and influential of the serial publications to come out of the Haight Ashbury community. Allen Cohen, with financial backing from psychedelic entrepreneur, Ron Thelin, published the first issue of the Oracle in September 1966. Easily recognized by its psychedelic covers, the Oracle’s goal was, in the words of Cohen, “to judo the tabloid lowprice anguish propaganda and profit form to confront its readers with a rainbow of beauty and words ringing with truth and transcendence.” Vol. 1, no. 7. features Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and Gary Snyder on the cover. The four had gathered for a “historic” meeting to discuss “the problem of whether to drop out or take over.”
BEATNIKHIWAY 