Landscapes of Language: Richard Brautigan's Fiction

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural celebrity, a writer that the would-be hip just had to read. The problem was that his fame did not rest on the considerable literary virtues of his work but, to a great extent, on a hippie image exemplified by the photograph of him on the cover of his breakthrough novel, Trout Fishing in America. When nobody wanted tie-dye shirts and gurus any more, they didn’t want Brautigan either. Academics have followed the public’s lead: this is the first book-length study of Brautigan in English for 30 years. Its purpose is to reclaim Brautigan’s reputation. Dr. John Tanner analyses Brautigan’s fiction against the background of the cultural and literary upheavals from which it emerged and demonstrates that Brautigan is no mere Sixties curio but an innovative and vibrant American voice ignored for far too long.

About the author

John Tanner was born in South Wales, graduated from Swansea University, and worked as a journalist
on regional and national newspapers before becoming a corporate executive with a publishing group. He took advantage of early retirement in 2001 to pursue a radically different course, as a poet and academic. He chose to write his doctoral thesis on Brautigan after coming across Trout Fishing in America in a second-hand book shop in Arizona. “It’s not about how to fish,” the shop assistant warned him. He now teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Bangor University. He is an elected member of the Welsh Academy of writers and his poetry has appeared in various magazines, in the anthology The Lie of the Land, and in the collected volume of his verse, Pieces, both published by Cinnamon Press. He lives in North Wales.