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  • The Paris Review

    Cooking with Richard Brautigan

    by Valerie Stivers Oct 05, 2018 6 minutes


    “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I will tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.” These are the opening lines of In Watermelon Sugar, the third novel by Richard Brautigan (1935–1984), a poet who was published twenty-three times in Rolling Stone between 1968 and 1970 and who has been called the last of the Beats. The next lines read: “Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.”

    Brautigan achieved literary fame after his second novel, 1967’s , captured the hearts of the counterculture and sold two million copies. He went into decline in the late seventies and early eighties and died by suicide in 1984 at age forty-nine. His books had a groovy design, which

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