Jubilee Hitchhiker: An epic bio of ’60s icon Richard Brautigan

Hjortsberg, an accomplished novelist, was a close friend — and a neighbor. That crowd around Livingston, Montana included writers Thomas McGuane, Hjorstberg, Tim Cahill, Philip Caputo, Guy de la Valdene and (these days) Jim Harrison; painter Russell Chatham; actors Jeff Bridges and Peter Fonda. Not a bad bunch of running buddies. And they all loved Richard.

They remain heartbroken.

After Brautigan’s suicide, Hjortsberg announced that he intended to write a biography of his great friend. Twenty-five years in the works, it is here, after the author no doubt battled enormous odds — many of them emotional — to stitch together the life story of this gifted and difficult man.

Like all great biographies, it’s history. Hjorstberg puts his central character in the middle of a sweeping narrative that takes the country from the Great Depression into the Reagan Years.

Brautigan symbolized the hippie ethos that grew from San Francisco, where he was in the mid-1960s. Tied to that generation and philosophy as he was, eventually the world passed him by, and he could not cope.

I interviewed his friend, the great novelist Tom McGuane. He was talking about another friend, Hunter S. Thompson, but he could just as easily have been talking about Brautigan, another one of his generation’s more famous literary suicides: “He was a wonderful writer and he loved being a celebrity but, once again, that comes and goes. Literature is always there and writing is always there. They don’t come and go. If you get addicted to being popular, you’re hosed.”

Brautigan was a gentle soul, and when the adulation passed him by, as it did so many icons of his generation, it was a difficult thing to grasp. He continued writing — it was always there for him — and he struggled with why, since he hadn’t changed, his audience had.

No wonder it took so long to write this book. Hjortsberg was writing an epic, not just a remembrance of a friend. He re-creates Brautigan’s childhood, his absent father, his painful adolescence, his emergence as the jester of hippie culture. The book is masterful at recreating time and place.

Everyone, it seems, has a Brautigan story. Most of them are funny. Hjortsberg was diligent in tracking down all of the stories, to give a full three-dimensional portrait better than anything Hollywood can throw at us.

(Young folks! If you ever wished you had been born early enough to experience the joy and intensity of the 1960s, this book is as close as you can get to being there.)

Hjortsberg, as a novelist, is a genius at writing about place — whether it’s San Francisco in the hedonistic and idealistic 1960s, or Montana in the depressed and trickle-down 1980s.

It is the fastest 852 pages you will ever read. It will open up to you the novels and verse of Richard Brautigan, which will give you a window on those long-lost times.

It is a monster of a book — both in physical weight, and in emotional weight.

Like its subject, Jubilee Hitchhiker is unforgettable.

William McKeen chairs the journalism department at Boston University and is the author of several books, including Mile Marker Zero, about Key West in the 1970s, and Outlaw Journalist, a biography of Hunter S. Thompson.