The letters of Richard Ford, 1797-1858

The Western works of Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, and John Nichols have generally improved as these writers have come to a deeper understanding of their adopted -449- region. See especially McGuane's Keep the Change (1989), Ford's Wildfire (1990), and Nichols's American Blood (1989), a powerful example of a novelistic Theater of Cruelty. Before his apparent suicide, Richard Brautigan had lived near McGuane in Montana, although Brautigan had also taken to spending part of each year in Japan. Born and raised in the Northwest, Brautigan moved to San Francisco in the mid-1950s when the Beat movement was under way. He first found print as a poet, and some critics argue that his masterpiece, Trout Fishing in America (1967), should be read not as a novel but as a serial poem like those of Jack Spicer, Brautigan's friend and mentor. Although knowing Spicer's work can help a reader to understand Brautigan, Trout Fishing should be classified as a novel, for its author intended it to be one, as he indicated when he published "The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America" in Esquire (October 1970) ...»