Trout Fishing in America (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Richard Brautigan
- First Published: 1967
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Picaresque
- Time of Work: Fall, 1960, through fall, 1961, with flashbacks to the 1940’s
- Setting: San Francisco, various trout streams in northern California and Idaho, and the recalled cities of Tacoma, Portland, and Great Falls
- Principal Characters: The Narrator, Trout Fishing in America Shorty, The Kool-Aid Wino
- Genres: Long fiction, Surrealist literature
- Subjects: 1960’s, Memory, Philosophy or philosophers, Love or romance, Nature, Rivers or waterways, San Francisco, Pacific Northwest, Fishing or fishermen
- Locales: San Francisco, CA, Northwest (U.S.)
The Story:
Trout Fishing in America begins with a description of the book’s cover photograph, a picture of Brautigan and his wife, Virginia “Ginny” Adler, in front of the statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco’s Washington Square. The poor gather there around five in the afternoon to eat sandwiches given to them by the church across the street. One of the narrator’s friends unwrapped his sandwich to find only a leaf of spinach inside.
The first time the narrator heard about trout fishing in America was from a drunken stepfather and, as a child in...
[The entire page is 2399 words long]
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