Author of the widely popular novel Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan was a countercultural hero in the United States in the 1960s. Although he never aligned himself with any group, Brautigan, with his long hair, broad-brimmed hat, wire-rim glasses, and hobnail boots, became a hippie icon comparable during his generation to Jack Kerouac and John Lennon.

Brautigan was born on January 30, 1935, in Tacoma, Washington. He moved to San Francisco in the mid-1950s where he met Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and became loosely associated with the Beat poetry movement. In the 1960s, he wrote and published his first three novels, which would be his most popular: A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishingin America, and In Watermelon Sugar.

Trout Fishing in America was by far the most enduring and important of these. Published in 1967, it went through four printings before being...