The best-known work of richard brautigan,
Trout Fishing in America is often considered the
novel that best captures the zeitgeist of the social,
cultural, and political change that was centered in
San Francisco, California, during the late 1960s
which was known as the counterculture or the
Summer of Love. Trout Fishing in America features
an anonymous narrator who relates witty observations and stories through an episodic narrative
structure that is full of unconventional but vivid
images that are powered by whimsy and metaphor.
The result, says John Cooley, is a “highly stylized
kaleidoscope of little fictions” that seem to suggest a transformative healing for the American
pastoral ideal which had been lost to commercialism, environmental degradation, and social
decay. Cooley notes that the idea of trout fishing
in America represents the book itself being written
by Brautigan, a character in the novel, a place, an
outdoor sport, a religion, and a state of mind. Despite lacking sustained narrative, plot or characterization and despite its short length, Trout Fishing in
America yielded to many critics and readers alike a
sense of immediate satisfaction, an in-the-moment
thrill that required no context or frame of reference other than the power of imagination. Newton Smith called Trout Fishing in America “one of
the first popular representations of the postmodern
novel” and said that it altered the shape of American literature. Other critics compared Trout Fishing in America to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
and welcomed Brautigan to the tradition of Ernest
Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, and Mark Twain.
Brautigan wrote Trout Fishing in America in
1961 during a summer camping trip in Idaho’s Stanley Basin with his wife Virginia and daughter Ianthe.
Jack Spicer worked with Brautigan to edit the Trout
Fishing in America manuscript line-by-line and arranged for Brautigan to give public readings of the
novel at a San Francisco church. Several excerpts
were published in Evergreen Review and The New
Writing in the USA, edited by Donald Allen and
robert creeley. All these opportunities provided
important early exposure for Brautigan and his writing. After rejection by several other publishers, Donald M. Allen, the West Coast representative of New
York–based Grove Press, published Trout Fishing in
America in 1967 under the imprint of his own San
Francisco nonprofit press, Four Seasons Foundation.
The novel was an immediate best-seller, and Brautigan was rocketed from cult status to international
fame as a new writer with a fresh, visionary voice.
In subsequent novels Brautigan vowed not to
write sequels to Trout Fishing in America and, instead, experimented with different literary genres.
General dismissal by literary critics reversed Brautigan’s initial literary success, and his popularity waned throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.
However, Trout Fishing in America, continually
translated into other languages, remains popular
for its unique prose style.