Richard Brautigan - Legacy

Legacy

Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, describes her memories of her father in her book You Can't Catch Death (2000).

Also in a 1980 letter to Brautigan from W. P. Kinsella, Kinsella states that Brautigan is his greatest influence for writing and his favorite book is In Watermelon Sugar.

In March 1994, a teenager named Peter Eastman, Jr. from Carpinteria, California legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America, and now teaches English at Waseda University in Japan. At around the same time, National Public Radio reported on a young couple who had named their baby Trout Fishing in America.

There is a folk rock band called Trout Fishing in America, and another called Watermelon Sugar, which quotes the opening paragraph of that book on their home page. The industrial rock band Machines of Loving Grace took their name from one of Brautigan's best-known poems. Indie rock songtress Neko Case has also admitted to basing her "Margaret vs. Pauline" from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood on the female characters of In Watermelon Sugar. Twin Rocks, Oregon, a song appearing on singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins' 1998 platinum record Soul's Core, tells the story of meeting a man who looks "just like Richard Brautigan" whilst watching the sunset on bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Another lyrical interpretation might be that the encounter was with Brautigan's ghost.

The Library for Unpublished Works envisioned by Brautigan in his novel The Abortion was housed at The Brautigan Library in Burlington, Vermont, until 1995 when it was moved to the nearby Fletcher Free Library where it remained until 2005. Although there were plans to move it to the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library, these never materialized. However, an agreement was made between Brautigan's daughter Ianthe Brautigan and the Vancouver, Washington, Clark County Historical Museum to move The Brautigan Library to the museum in 2010.

Kumquat Meringue is a literary journal out of Pine Island, Minnesota, dedicated to the memory and work of Brautigan.

The poem “Horse Child Breakfast” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is read to an English class by gliding champion George Moffat at the beginning of Robert Drew’s 1971 documentary film The Sun Ship Game.

Saltpeter, a London-based theatre company, launched a year-long initiative seeking collaborators - the Brautigan Book Club (BBC) - in January 2012 with a curated performance piece, The American Forever, Etc. Saltpeter's Brautigan project features the UK premiere of Tonseisha, a play by LA screenwriter Erik Patterson.

The documentary maker Adam Curtis produced a series of films for the BBC about the effect of computers on society called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

World renowned author Haruki Murakami cites Brautigan as an important influence on his work, along with Kurt Vonnegut, and Raymond Chandler.