Although published in 1967 and popularized as a counterculture book, Trout Fishing in America was written in 1961 as a late expression of the San Francisco Beat movement. Like the other Beats, Brautigan was affected by the Depression and World War II, and he saw in these historical periods of poverty and violence truths about America and human nature that could not be hidden by the complacent commercialism of the 1950s.

Yet the social issues of the Beats — McCarthyism, nuclear tests, capital punishment, and materialism — are only a part of the environment of which Brautigan writes. His book is actually concerned with American culture on the broadest scale, including the dreams and fantasies which define the meaning of America for ordinary citizens.

Instead of a battle between revolutionaries and an entrenched establishment, Brautigan's book explores the subtler and more pervasive contest between defining fantasies: his nostalgic...