Does Anyone Still Read Richard Brautigan?

I did, years ago. He was used to be pretty famous, well-known in the 1960s and 1970s both to the literati and the kind of high school students who read Kurt Vonnegut and National Lampoon, by which I mean me and a number of others. Like Vonnegut, he affected a sort of laid-back, dry, deadpan charm, along with the easily digestible whimsy of a harmless pothead -- kind of a forerunner to Tom Robbins. His books had titles like Trout Fishing in America, Willard and the Bowling Trophies, Sombrero Fallout and The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western. I remember them fondly, although I can't recall the first thing any of them were about -- an experience I probably share with many others.

Brautigan fell completely out of favor in the 1980s, when his counterculture cachet was long since used up. He was a forgotten relic and he died like one: after he blew his brains out, his body wouldn't be discovered for nearly a month. Not long after, the father he never knew learned that he had a son.

Unbeknownst to me until recently, there's been a gradual resurrection. Or maybe he's just never gone away. He remains in print and, by way of Golden Rule Jones, comes notice of a readably yet scholarly and well-organized Richard Brautigan Bibliography and Archive.

I don't know how Brautigan would read today. Maybe it would just seem like old hippie literature, redolent of a vanished America, when the bombers riding shotgun in the sky threatened to turn into butterflies above our nation. Anyway, I'm glad to see he is still finding readers. I hope a few of them are under 20.