From Publishers Weekly
In 1955 Brautigan was a lovelorn, 20-year-old literary hopeful who left his hometown of Eugene, Ore., for San Francisco's burgeoning Beat scene. He also left a sheaf of unpublished writings, along with a handwritten note (reproduced in the book) granting Edna Webster, the mother of Brautigan's first love and his best friend, all rights to the manuscripts, which, more than four decades later, have now emerged to make up this fragmentary collection of never-published poems and short prose. The signature themes and zany, melancholy sensibility that dominate Brautigan's most well-known works (Trout Fishing in America; In Watermelon Sugar) are prefigured here. The author inscribes himself as a thwarted lover enchanted to distraction by beautiful women, and as a man who endeavors to escape his social disillusion, depression and preoccupation with death by inventing endearing, childlike and frequently overstretched metaphors. The many short poems run the gamut from innocence to cruelty, often in record time: "For Christmas/ I/ will give my mother/ a/ time bomb." Short pieces ("Question 1": "Is it/ against/ the law/ to eat/ ice cream/ in hell?") may seem slight, but other sad fragments reveal glimpses of the writer's wretched childhood and stint in a mental institution. The short prose pieces are more polished, like the abbreviated scene of alcoholic domesticity in "A Glass of Beer" or "The Flower Burner," in which a boy hopes to spy on a skinny-dipping girl and instead witnesses his sordid neighbors. Brautigan fans will delight in the raw egotism, mixed metaphors and flawed melodrama that were later stylized to subtler effect, and critics may opine that Brautigan never outgrew his hormonal urgencies and puerile self-aggrandizement. The appearance of these early writings 15 years after Brautigan's death reaffirm his prismatic literary place as not only a tragic literary icon but as a na?ve insomniac, bitter depressive and whimsical wordsmith. (Sept.) FYI: The volume contains a note by Brautigan collector Burton Weiss and an introductory essay by Keith Abbott. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
How fitting it is that the earliest writings of one of the most quirky and enduringly popular voices of the 1960s, Richard Brautigan of Trout Fishing in America fame, emerge in the year that marks the thirtieth anniversaries of Woodstock and the first moon landing. When Brautigan left Eugene, Oregon, for the artistic mecca of San Francisco at age 21 in 1955, he bequeathed to Edna Webster, the mother of both his best buddy and his first girlfriend, a set of blithely agile poems and slyly funny short stories. Webster kept her gift until 1992, when she stunned a rare-book collector by describing her treasure and expressing her interest in selling it, a boon for Brautigan fans. Every selection in this slender volume bespeaks his wry affection for life and his love of literature. Brautigan's debt to e. e. cummings and the Beats is palpable, but so are his unique sense of irony and humor, flair for surrealism, earthiness, and juggler's ease in handling words, traits brought to piquant fruition in his celebrated later works. Donna Seaman


Los Angeles Weekly
"These early poems reveal the young Brautigan-in-formation tinkering with metaphor and trying on styles--a Beat knockoff here, a stab at Hemingway there. But they also reveal that Brautigan's peculiar comic collision of literary allusion, morbid drama and colloquial speech was already his own."


Review
"These early poems reveal the young Brautigan-in-formation tinkering with metaphor and trying on styles--a Beat knockoff here, a stab at Hemingway there. But they also reveal that Brautigan's peculiar comic collision of literary allusion, morbid drama and colloquial speech was already his own."


Review
"These early poems reveal the young Brautigan-in-formation tinkering with metaphor and trying on styles--a Beat knockoff here, a stab at Hemingway there. But they also reveal that Brautigan's peculiar comic collision of literary allusion, morbid drama and colloquial speech was already his own."


Book Description
On the eve of his departure from Eugene, Oregon, to San Francisco and worldly success, a twenty-one-year-old unpublished writer named Richard Brautigan gave these funny, buoyant stories and poems as a gift to Edna Webster, the beloved mother of both his best friend and his first "real" girlfriend. "When I am rich and famous, Edna," he told her, "this will be your social security.' The stories and poems show Brautigan as hopelessly lovestruck, cheerily goofy, and at his most disarmingly innocent. We see not only a young man and young artist about to bloom, but also the whole literary sensibility of the 1960s counterculture about to spread its wings and fly.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

On the eve of his departure from Eugene, Oregon, to San Francisco and worldly success, a twenty-one-year-old unpublished writer named Richard Brautigan gave these funny, buoyant stories and poems as a gift to Edna Webster, the beloved mother of both his best friend and his first "real" girlfriend. The stories and poems show Brautigan as hopelessly lovestruck, cheerily goofy, and at his most disarmingly innocent. We see not only a young man and young artist about to bloom, but also the whole literary sensibility of the 1960s counterculture about to spread its wings and fly.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In 1955 Brautigan was a lovelorn, 20-year-old literary hopeful who left his hometown of Eugene, Ore., for San Francisco's burgeoning Beat scene. He also left a sheaf of unpublished writings, along with a handwritten note (reproduced in the book) granting Edna Webster, the mother of Brautigan's first love and his best friend, all rights to the manuscripts, which, more than four decades later, have now emerged to make up this fragmentary collection of never-published poems and short prose. The signature themes and zany, melancholy sensibility that dominate Brautigan's most well-known works (Trout Fishing in America; In Watermelon Sugar) are prefigured here. The author inscribes himself as a thwarted lover enchanted to distraction by beautiful women, and as a man who endeavors to escape his social disillusion, depression and preoccupation with death by inventing endearing, childlike and frequently overstretched metaphors. The many short poems run the gamut from innocence to cruelty, often in record time: "For Christmas/ I/ will give my mother/ a/ time bomb." Short pieces ("Question 1": "Is it/ against/ the law/ to eat/ ice cream/ in hell?") may seem slight, but other sad fragments reveal glimpses of the writer's wretched childhood and stint in a mental institution. The short prose pieces are more polished, like the abbreviated scene of alcoholic domesticity in "A Glass of Beer" or "The Flower Burner," in which a boy hopes to spy on a skinny-dipping girl and instead witnesses his sordid neighbors. Brautigan fans will delight in the raw egotism, mixed metaphors and flawed melodrama that were later stylized to subtler effect, and critics may opine that Brautigan never outgrew his hormonal urgencies and puerile self-aggrandizement. The appearance of these early writings 15 years after Brautigan's death reaffirm his prismatic literary place as not only a tragic literary icon but as a na ve insomniac, bitter depressive and whimsical wordsmith. (Sept.) FYI: The volume contains a note by Brautigan collector Burton Weiss and an introductory essay by Keith Abbott. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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