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    Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan
    Unavailable
    Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan
    Unavailable
    Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan
    Ebook1,870 pages29 hours

    Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

    By William Hjortsberg

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “Brautigan’s life unfolds as a tragicomedy, and the book vividly evokes the heady 1960s and 1970s, 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 1984, 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 1984, 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 shape his mountain of material, the enormous chaos of Brautigan’s life, into a narrative—that makes Jubilee Hitchhiker most remarkable.” —Harper’s Magazine
     
    “One of the merits of Jubilee Hitchhiker is that it not only tracks Brautigan’s life but also deftly flips open any number of worlds, from the Beat and counterculture scenes in San Francisco to gonzo times in Montana.” —The New York Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2012
    ISBN9781619020450
    Unavailable
    Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan
    Author

    William Hjortsberg

    William Hjortsberg (1941–2017) was an acclaimed author of novels and screenplays. Born in New York City, Hjortsberg’s first success came with Alp (1969), an offbeat story of an Alpine skiing village, which Hjortsberg’s friend Thomas McGuane called, “quite possibly the finest comic novel written in America.” In the 1970s, Hjortsberg wrote two science fiction novels, Gray Matters (1971) and Symbiography (1973), as well as Toro! Toro! Toro! (1974), a comic jab at the macho world of bullfighting. His best-known work is Falling Angel (1978), a hard-boiled occult mystery. In 1987 the book was adapted into a film titled Angel Heart, which starred Robert De Niro and Mickey Rourke. Hjortsberg’s work also includes Jubilee Hitchhiker (2012), a biography of Richard Brautigan, American writer and voice of 1960s counterculture.  

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    Reviews for Jubilee Hitchhiker

    3/5

    11 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Though not a big fan of William Hjortsberg it must be said that his work was diligent and most likely as honest as could be. But I am convinced in my own mind that a large part of the reason for his writing this biography was to insure his own place in a writer's history as a close friend of Richard Brautigan. A good portion of this mammoth book was to report on the writing life of Gatz and his wife and their life as neighbors of RB in Montana. But I also give Gatz a pass as the amount of time and hard work that went into compiling and recording this valuable information for Brautigan fans such as myself is appreciated. It is my opinion that the mammoth size of this undertaking is as daunting to the reader as it was for the person writing it.

      This is a very sad tale. The actual life of Richard Brautigan is nothing anyone would aspire to unless one wants to rub elbows with the likes of Jeff Bridges, Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Russell Chatham, Harry Dean Stanton, and I could go on and on just as William Hjortsberg did, but I won't. But it is amazing to me that Brautigan accomplished what he did coming from his family of origin. A very sick and dysfunctional crowd of misfits and losers. The fact that RB never finished high school is a testament to his genius on the page. But it is also apparent that his lack of formal education was a detriment to him and ultimately contributed perhaps to his undoing. Richard Brautigan was a practicing alcoholic to the last day of his life and that is what may have kept him alive as long as it did. He never sought help for his addiction and to my knowledge never dealt at all with the underlying sickness enveloping his body and mind due to his environment growing up and the lack of any suitable adult in which to guide him.

      Richard Brautigan accomplished much in his short life and I am not certain he could have done much more with it given his history. William Hjortsberg can be proud of his own accomplishment here as well, even though at times his writing and syrupy self-love was a bit too much for me to handle. This was a three star book but I gave it four stars as I was extremely interested in the life of Richard Brautigan and Gatz gave me much more than just the information I craved. And I feel I know Richard Brautigan better now because of reading this book. William Hjortsberg at least did not attempt to deconstruct the Brautigan texts and allowed the writer's life and behavior to show us who he really was. This book does not glorify Richard Brautigan at all, but demonstrates instead what a person can do. And in the case of RB that meant: a lot.
    • 2/5
      OK, I did not read it all. It goes on and on feeling like cleaned up transcripts of god knows how many interviews, cut up, time-organized, but without ever getting at Brautigan. The book told stories about him, it did not try tell you who this guy really was. Not much psychology, here.

      Everyone thought Brautigan unknowable, so maybe this proves it.

      For me it was like rummaging through the life of someone who lived down the street many years ago, someone you did not know, but recognized every once in a while. And then you moved on and he did too.

      In fact, Brautigan did live down the street from me in San Francisco and we overlapped in times there. So the stories are more interesting to me than you, I bet.

      Also, the book documents (again) the beat and poetry scene in SF. It tells publishing stories too: agents, writers, back-bitings, readings, groupies, small presses,big ones, too.

      OK to browse through for a day or two.