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This is a collection of surreal short stories that don't make a lot of sense and after you read a few of them you feel kind of dizzy. Imagine Mark Twain in a disembodied dream state. The book is more about perception than about trout, although trout do show up with some regularity. The book was written in the summer of 1961 and finally published in 1967 after numerous rejections. Brautigan wrote the book while camping with his wife and child in Idaho's Stanley Basin. It was written on a portable typewriter alongside the trout streams. With a $350.00 tax refund they bought a ten year old Plymouth station wagon and, according to his wife, Virginia, "We loaded it down with books, a Coleman stove and a Coleman lantern, a tent, sleeping bags, diapers, and we took off for Snake River country of Idaho. We'd camp beside the streams, and Richard would get out his old portable typewriter and a card table. That's when he began to write Trout Fishing in America. He had to learn to write prose; everything he wrote turned into a poem." He had also brought with him a fly rod and reel that he used to fish streams and rivers along the way. Brautigan was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington. Not much is know of his childhood, he was always reluctant to share information about his past, but he certainly suffered from poverty and neglect. He produced most of his important work while living in San Francisco in the 1960s, where he was considered the voice of the counter-culture that had established itself there at the time. In 1967 Brautigan was Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology. At age 49 he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. |
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Trout
Fishing in America 
