From Lawrence Wright’s 1985 Rolling Stone article about the death of writer Richard Brautigan:

“The old Beats looked at Richard with envy and surprise. The Beats were out of fashion, and Bunthorne was all the rage and he was rich, too, thunderously rich by their standards. Ferlinghetti had been the first to publish parts of Trout Fishing in his City Lights Journal, but like most Beats, he had never taken Richard’s writing seriously. ‘As an editor, I always kept waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer,’ he says now. ‘I never could stand cute writing. He could never be an important writer like Hemingway — with that childish voice of his. Essentially he had a naïf style, a style based on a childlike perception of the world. The hippie cult was itself a childlike movement. I guess Richard was all the novelist the hippies needed. It was a nonliterate age.’

But it was an extraordinary time in every other respect. Cultural forms were exploding in the face of furious experimentation with drugs, art, sex, music, religion, social roles. Richard’s attitude toward all this, however, was ambivalent. He was widely credited with being the voice of the Summer of Love, but in fact he was contemptuous of most hippies, whom he saw as freeloaders and dizzy peaceniks. He had a horror of narcotics that seemed fanciful to his friends everybody used dope in those days except Richard.

His passions were basketball, the Civil War, Frank Lloyd Wright, Southern women writers, soap operas, the National Enquirer, chicken-fried steak and talking on the telephone. Wherever he was in the world, he would phone up his friends and talk for hours, sometimes reading them an entire book manuscript on a transpacific call. Time meant nothing to him, for he was a hopeless insomniac. Most of his friends dreaded it when Richard started reading his latest work to them, because he could not abide criticism of any sort. He had a dead ear for music. Ianthe remembered that he used to buy record albums because of the girls on the covers. He loved to take walks, but he loathed exercise in any other form.”

Another Richard Brautigan post:

• Brautigan waxes sardonic about technology.