Craft: Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) was a proto-Beat writer and a proto-Hippie writer. He was older than either of those generations, but remained fresh and original through the excesses of both. Though he published ten novels, two collections of short stories, and four books of poetry, he began his writing life as a poet. He was never part of any establishment, never had students, and never had any successors or predecessors. He was his own entity. Alcoholic and depressed, at 49 he ran out of stories to tell, like his idol Ernest Hemingway, and on September 16, 1984, shot himself in the head with a .44 in Bolinas, California.