Jubilee hitchhiker
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William Hjortsberg
Counterpoint ($)
by Mark Terrill
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To simplify, Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan (Counterpoint; pages), William Hjortsberg’s massive new biography of the late, once-iconic poet and novelist, can be roughly divided into three parts:
BUMMER. Brautigan’s childhood years, growing up poor and alienated in a dysfunctional family in the eternally drizzly Pacific Northwest. Highlights included the poet’s hospitalization—and treatment with electric shock—after throwing a rock into the local police station after a girl he had a crush on rejected him.
TRIPPY. Brautigan’s arrival in San Francisco, well ahead of the Summer of Love, whose spirit he briefly seemed to embody, and his immersion into the wild and crazy world of North Beach bohemia.
This section of the book, which comes as a welcome relief from the depression and Raymond Carver-esque solitude which preceded it, also serves as a spirited encapsulation of times and places that now seem as distant as pet rocks.
Despite a less than welcoming literary embrace from Allen Ginsberg, who called him “Frood’’ and a “neurotic creep,’’ perhaps in reaction to a competing literary visionary’s encroachment on his home turf, Brautigan found succor and support from North Beach legends of the time, including Jack Spicer, himself an exile from th
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Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan
"Brautigan's life unfolds as a tragicomedy, and the book vividly evokes the heady s and s, especially in the Bay Area." --The San Francisco Chronicle
Confident and robust, Jubilee Hitchhiker is an comprehensive biography of late novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, author of Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur, among many others. When Brautigan took his own life in September of , his close friends and network of artists and writers were devastated though not entirely surprised. To many, Brautigan was shrouded in enigma, erratic and unpredictable in his habits and presentation. But his career was formidable, an inspiration to young writers like Hjortsberg trying to get their start. As Hjortsberg guides us through his search to uncover Brautigan as a man, the reader is pulled deeply into the writer's world. Ultimately this is a work that seeks to connect the Brautigan known to his fans with the man who ended his life so abruptly in , while revealing the close ties between his writing and the actual events of his life. Part history, part biography, and part memoir, this etches the portrait of a man destroyed by his genius.
"It's Hjortsberg's ability to work like a novelist--to s