On this day in 1984 Richard Brautigan's body was found in his California home, a suicide some weeks earlier. The literary critics have never been kind to the writing, and the biographers have been unable to penetrate the writer's life, but Brautigan was a counter-culture hero in the late sixties and seventies. This was largely based on the 1967 best seller, Trout Fishing in America, but The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar were also hits, so that a 1970 feature story in Life magazine could declare, "Gentle Poet of the Young: A Cult Grows Around Richard Brautigan ... FULL STORY »
