I LOVE Brautigan

January 30th is the birthday of Richard Brautigan, born in Tacoma, Washington (1935), best known for his 1967 book Trout Fishing in America, which has sold millions of copies around the world. It’s only 112 pages long, it’s abstract, it doesn’t have much of a plot, and characters in the story reappear in seemingly unrelated incidents. The title “Trout Fishing in America” is also the name of a hotel in the book, and a character in the book, and a sort of adjectival phrase to modify other nouns in the book.

He wrote the book in the summer of 1961, when he was camping with his wife and daughter in the Stanley Basin of Idaho. He’d go for hikes, then plop down alongside some trout stream and write stream-of-consciousness thoughts about the search for the perfect trout stream. The book became a cult hit when it was published later in the ’60s, with the search for the perfect trout stream a metaphor for youthful quests for freedom, idealism, and idyllic lands.

In Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan wrote:

“Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy’s hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.”