Richard Brotigan

Richard Brautigan was an American writer and poet, an iconic figure of the 1960s–1970s counterculture. He was the author of 11 novels, 10 poetry collections, and 2 short story collections, as well as 6 essays and the musical album Listening to Richard Brautigan.

Popular writers Haruki Murakami and Erlend Loe call Brautigan their teacher. Vasily Aksyonov also acknowledged Brautigan’s influence on his work, alongside Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Albee.

A complete and accurate description of Brautigan’s life is an utopian task. In part, he himself was to blame for this, because when telling friends and in his works about himself, he often embellished and fantasized. The accounts of his loved ones are quite contradictory and confusing. Therefore, the details of Brautigan’s biography are very often based more on assumptions than on facts.

Richard Gary Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, on January 30, 1935, to Bernard F. Brautigan, a factory worker and later a World War II veteran, and Lulu Mary Kehoe “Mary Lou” Brautigan, a waitress. Richard’s parents divorced before he was born. He learned about his father and the fact that his real surname was Brautigan from his mother when it was time to receive his diploma: she then decided that the correct name should appear on the document. Richard saw his father only twice.

Brautigan grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States with his mother, foster fathers, and half-sisters and half-brothers. His mother was married three more times. The writer had two half-sisters, Barbara Titland and Sandra Jean Porterfield, as well as a half-brother, William David Faulston Jr.

Biographers believe that the foster fathers treated both Richard and his mother harshly. Much of his childhood experience found reflection in his poems and stories. The Brautigan family was not merely poor, but destitute, living on odd jobs and welfare, and moving often from place to place. In 1943, when Richard was 8 years old, they spent a couple of months in a motel in Great Falls, Montana. A year later the family moved to Eugene