SOURCE: Abbott, Keith. “Shadows and Marble: Richard Brautigan.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 8 (fall 1988): 117-25.

In the following essay, Abbott discusses the critical neglect of Brautigan's work and attempts a reevaluation of his skill at dialogue and narrative.

“What I desired to do in marble, I can poke my shadow through.”

—Richard Brautigan, from an unpublished short story “The F. Scott Fitzgerald Ahhhhhhhhhhh, Pt. 2”

Since Richard Brautigan's death, his reputation has hardly been cast in marble. His writing has been relegated to the shadowland of popular flashes, that peculiar American graveyard of overnight sensations. When a writer dies, appreciation of his work seldom reverses field, but continues in the direction that it was headed at the moment of death, and this has been true for Brautigan. Even during Brautigan's best-seller years in the United States, critical studies of his work were few in number. What there were never exerted...