He wrote nearly every morning, regardless of keening hangovers. He spent the rest of the day, William Hjortsberg notes in “Jubilee Hitchhiker,” his sprawling and definitive new biography of this most offbeat of American writers, “in pursuit of happiness.” Happiness for Brautigan usually meant, to borrow the title of an undervalued W. M. Spackman novel, an armful of warm girl. In San Francisco, where he mostly lived, and elsewhere, he had groupies and would hit on “anything that wasn’t nailed down,” one friend commented. He put some of his favorite bohemian cuties on the front of his books. “Richard’s sexual archive,” another friend said, “is reflected on his book covers.” Happiness meant seeing plenty of movies. Once he began making money, in the early 1970s, it also meant good food (oysters, pork buns, the most expensive lobsters at The Palm steakhouse) and guns, which, when drunk, he would frequently discharge indoors. Brautigan and the film director Sam Peckinpah, a friend, once opened fire with a .357 Magnum and a .38 Colt at an alley cat through an open hotel room window.  Brautigan’s signal pleasure, though, from the time he was a young boy, growing up poor in a broken family in Tacoma, Wash., until the end of his life, was trout fishing. It was an obsession that fed his first and probably best novel, “Trout Fishing in America,” written in 1961 but not issued by a major publishing house until 1969.  Generations of anglers have picked up “Trout Fishing in America” based on its title alone, expecting a how-to volume. What they get instead is akin to a gentle tab of LSD: an eccentric and slyly profound novel, seemingly narrated by the ghost of trout fishing past and filled with surreal post-“Walden” visions like a dismembered trout stream for sale at a junkyard.  Brautigan wrote his best novels — “Trout Fishing in America,” “A Confederate General From Big Sur” (1964), “In Watermelon Sugar” (1968) and “The Abortion” (1971) — and books of poetry, notably “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster” (1968) before fame swamped him in the early ’70s, when he was in his mid-to-late 30s.  He got rich suddenly and enjoyed himself vastly. His writing got woolier and worse, however, and the critics turned on him. He spent most of the money. His looks began to go. (One of his best-known poems is titled “My Nose Is Growing Old.”) Neurotic and increasingly in debt, he committed suicide with a handgun in 1984, at 49.  Critics have clashed over the merits of even his best stuff, many agreeing with Jonathan Yardley, who said that Brautigan was “the Love Generation’s answer to Charlie Schultz. Happiness is a warm hippie.” But the novelist Thomas McGuane, later to become a close friend, reviewed an omnibus edition of his early work with admiration in The New York Times Book Review. In a letter, the critic Malcolm Cowley called Brautigan’s poems, “pensées, like grasshoppers in flight.”  In this overly long but involving new biography, Mr. Hjortsberg, a novelist who was a friend and neighbor of Brautigan’s during his Montana years, nails the qualities that I’ve admired about Brautigan’s work, notably his “easy offhand voice, his concern for average working-class people, his matter-of-fact treatment of death, and his often startling juxtaposition of wildly disparate images.”  One of the merits of “Jubilee Hitchhiker” is that it not only tracks Brautigan’s life but also deftly flips open any number of worlds, from the Beat and counterculture scenes in San Francisco to gonzo times in Montana with writers like Mr. McGuane and Jim Harrison, and wildcats like Warren Zevon, Rip Torn, Jeff Bridges, Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton.  Brautigan was essentially a loner, but he had a Zelig-like quality and seemed to know everyone and go everywhere. He drank heavily in Western bars with the young Jimmy Buffett. He shot basketball and tore up money (a long story) with Jack Nicholson. He had an impromptu pasta sauce cook-off with Francis Ford Coppola. He drunkenly pointed a rifle at Wim Wenders, who had mildly criticized the translation in one of Brautigan’s German editions. Janis Joplin wanted him to name her new band.  Bored at a party one night, he hurled a brick through a window, a typical Brautigan performance. When the host screamed at him, he replied, “I don’t want things to be predictable.”  Brautigan and his three siblings grew up in and around Tacoma, Wash., (and later, Eugene, Ore.); his mother worked as a cashier, among other jobs. He never knew his father.He was a tall, shy, pale kid, a Boo Radley whom few at his high school paid attention to. He knew from a young age he wanted to write, but didn’t attend college.  When Brautigan was 20, sick with unrequited love for a girl named Linda, he wandered into a police station and asked to be arrested. To make sure he was, he threw a rock through a glass panel. He ended up in a mental institution, receiving electroshock therapy 12 times.  A year later, in 1956, Brautigan made his way to San Francisco, falling in with a scene that included the poets Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder. Allen Ginsberg didn’t like Brautigan, nicknaming him Frood. Brautigan was livid when the publicity material for his novel “A Confederate General From Big Sur” linked him with the Beats.  He slowly developed his literary style and cultivated his look. By the mid-’60s he was a San Francisco celebrity. He printed poems on seed packets and gave them away in a collection titled “Please Plant This Book.” He appeared regularly in Herb Caen’s popular San Francisco Chronicle newspaper column. In the late 1960s he published some two dozen short stories in his friend Jann Wenner’s new magazine, Rolling Stone.  Brautigan went national in 1969, when Delacorte Press published “Trout Fishing in America,” “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster” and “In Watermelon Sugar” in one volume. Before long he dearly wished to shed his whimsical image.  He never could. When he got drunk and said something cruel about Mr. McGuane in public at a party, the author writes, Mr. McGuane spat back, “You’re nothing but a pet rock.” He then called Brautigan a “hula hoop” and concluded, “You should get down on your knees every day and thank God for creating hippies!”  Brautigan was a generous man who had a dark side. He was prone to anger and jealousy. He married twice but was never faithful for long. He was sexist, even for his time. He had a bondage fetish that spooked some women. He wrote a comic poem about venereal disease, but his own recurring bouts of herpes weren’t funny at all.  This jumbo-size biography is perhaps an odd tribute to a writer whose books were tiny, like small sachets of fragrant rice. It’s on the Robert Caro side of things. It’s total overkill. But it’s an enjoyable soak in American literary bohemia, and a cleareyed portrait of a man whom Mr. Hjortsberg aptly calls “a connoisseur of the perfect moment.” His book is full of them.
This book about the short life of the novelist and poet Richard Brautigan distills San Francisco and Montana in the 1960s and â70s and the wild lives of the subject and his friends.