The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings [Paperback]

Richard Brautigan (Author), Keith Abbott (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 1999

On the eve of his departure from Eugene, Oregon, to San Francisco and worldly success, a twenty-one-year-old unpublished writer named Richard Brautigan gave these funny, buoyant stories and poems as a gift to Edna Webster, the beloved mother of both his best friend and his first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.

Editorial Reviews

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 He also left a sheaf of unpublished writings, along with a handwritten note (reproduced in the book) granting Edna Webster, the mother of Brautigan's first love and his best friend, all rights to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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; First Trade Edition edition (August 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395974690
• ISBN-13: 978-0395974698
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #919,799 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Qualified 5, February 5, 2000

By 

P. Harris (West Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (Paperback)

This collection of "Undiscovered Writings" is a gift given to those who love poetry and literature. The poetry in this book is delightfully quirky, surreal and sad in the way it describes both strange and common instances of fantasy and life. Brautigan has never been more consistent with his poetic message. This book is a step or two above his other poetic masterpiece "Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt."

So why "A Qualified 5"? Because the way the book is put together is disruptive to the poetry reader. With all due respect to the amount of undiscovered writing now available to the public, which I am very thankful, the cluttered way the poems are placed on the page result in disrupting the flow of reading the poems themselves. How about one poem a page? Those poems deserve to be presented in a creative space to reflect the creative place they were written in.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Earliest Brautigan not his best: but all the elements here, October 5, 1999

By 

kevin jones - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (Paperback)

The Edna Webster collection gives readers, old, new, & those who might have lost touch, a glimpse of the earliest Brautigan. While possibly not his best work (But whose juvenalia is? Keats excepted), most all of the elements that we identify with Brautigan are here--humor, whimsy, overarching and immutable sadness. The only major weakness is a singularly ugly cover that seems to be an attempt to replicate the early, funky Four Seasons covers, but designed by someone who'd never actually seen one. Not to worry, however: while you're reading the book--and quite probably being charmed by the text--you can't see the cover. Mayonnaise. --Kevin Jones

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Beginning, September 3, 1999

By 

John A. Gregorio (Castalian Springs, TN) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (Paperback)

You either like Brautigan or you write thousands of words why you don't like his works! Obviously, I like him. About 60% of this work can stand next to his later writings, the rest is a poet trying to find his voice and technique. This work is enjoyble to read as literature and as an historical document.