The anecdote sounds too good to be true, but John Radzicwicz, head of Houghton Mifflin's Mariner imprint, warrants its veracity. He says, "It's a quote I've repeated shamelessly" to talk up the May release of Richard Brautigan: The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, which contains neverbefore-published material from the poet who committed suicide in 1984 after achieving superstardom with Trout Fishing in America. According to Radzicwicz, when Brautigan was a callow 21 and about to depart Eugene, Ore., for San Francisco, the then-unpublished writer presented a bundle of stories and poems to one Edna Webster, the mother both of his best friend and of his first serious girlfriend, with these words: "When I am rich and famous, Edna, this will be your Social Security." Edna is still alive, reports Radzicwicz, cautioning, "There's a little bit of hyperbole in the quote, but without citing numbers, I would say we'll tap into the same market that has so appreciably bought his backlist. The [new] individual pieces are classic Brautigan." As it happens, Edna Webster had earlier sold the original manuscripts to a library in Berkeley, Calif., from which Mariner acquired publishing rights. Poor Edna.

Before he was the hirsute hippie icon in granny glasses and crusty denims pictured on the cover of such books as Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan was a working-class outsider in Eugene, Oregon, filling notebooks with tributes to "the Unknown Dreamer" and rudimentary versions of the surreal fables and funny, folksy epigrams that would make his name. In 1956, the year he left for San Francisco, Brautigan, then 21, signed over to a girlfriend's mother, in tidy schoolboy handwriting, the rights to the poems and stories that are published here for the first time. The pieces range from unabashedly moon-eyed love lyrics to streetwise vignettes to a grimly minimalist account of his stay in a state mental hospital. (Brautigan committed suicide in 1984.) The young poet strikes familiar adolescent poses, railing against "conformity and averageism" and declaring that "Pretend / is / a city / bigger / than New York." But among the saccharine metaphors can be found, like the prize in a box of Cracker Jack, the gently ironic titles-in-search-of-a-poem ("Horsemeat for Sale") and disarmingly gimcrack koans ("Question: Is / this poem / as beautiful / as two five dollar bills / rubbing together?") that became his stock in trade. There are also a handful of prose pieces, gestures toward the shaggy, improvised not-quite-stories that critics would later suggest classifying simply as "Brautigans." But this touching first will and testament comes pretty much as billed in a poem titled "Advertisement": "For sale, / cheap, / 206 / slightly sticky / love poems, / written / by / a seventeen-year-old / poet."

How fitting it is that the earliest writings of one of the most quirky and enduringly popular voices of the 1960s, Richard Brautigan of Trout Fishing in America fame, emerge in the year that marks the thirtieth anniversaries of Woodstock and the first moon landing. When Brautigan left Eugene, Oregon, for the artistic mecca of San Francisco at age 21 in 1955 he bequeathed to Edna Webster the mother of both of his best buddy and his first girlfriend, a set of blithely agile poems and slyly funny short stories. Webster kept her gift until 1992, when she stunned a rare-book collector by describing her treasure and expressing her interest in selling it, a boon for Brautigan fans. Every selection in this slender volume bespeaks his wry affection for life and his love of literature. Brautigan's debt to e. e. cummings and the Beats is palpable, but so are his unique sense of irony and humor, flair for surrealism, earthiness, and juggler's ease in handling words, traits brought to piquant fruition in his celebrated later works.

In 1955 Brautigan was a lovelorn, 20-year-old literary hopeful who left his hometown of Eugene, Ore., for San Francisco's burgeoning Beat scene. He also left a sheaf of unpublished writings, along with a handwritten note (reproduced in the book) granting Edna Webster, the mother of Brautigan's first love and his best friend, all rights to the manuscripts, which, more than four decades later, have now emerged to make up this fragmentary collection of never-published poems and short prose. The signature themes and zany, melancholy sensibility that dominate Brautigan's most well-known works (Trout Fishing in America; In Watermelon Sugar) are prefigured here. The author inscribes himself as a thwarted lover enchanted to distraction by beautiful women, and as a man who endeavors to escape his social disillusion, depression and preoccupation with death by inventing endearing, childlike and frequently overstretched metaphors. The many short poems run the gamut from innocence to cruelty, often in record time: "For Christmas/ I/will give my mother/ a/ time bomb." Short pieces ("Question 1": "Is it/ against/the law/to eat/ice cream/in hell?") may seem slight, but other sad fragments reveal glimpses of the writer's wretched childhood and stint in a mental institution. The short prose pieces are more polished, like the abbreviated scene of alcoholic domesticity in "A Glass of Beer" or "The Flower Burner," in which a boy hopes to spy on a skinny-dipping girl and instead witnesses his sordid neighbors. Brautigan fans will delight in the raw egotism, mixed metaphors and flawed melodrama that were later stylized to subtler effect, and critics may opine that Brautigan never outgrew his hormonal urgencies and puerile self-aggrandizement. The appearance of these early writings 15 years after Brautigan's death reaffirm his prismatic literary place as not only a tragic literary icon but as a naive insomniac, bitter depressive and whimsical wordsmith.

FYI: The volume contains a note by Brautigan collector Burton Weiss and an introductory essay by Keith Abbott.

Republications in one volume of three works by an experimental writer of extraordinary comic perception. "This is an important publication without the desolating tedium of recent literary 'importance.' These books are fun to read."

The most extraordinary literary discovery of the year for me was a young San Francisco writer, Richard Brautigans [sic], whose three-books-in one entitled Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar (Delacorte Press) will, I am told, shortly be published in this country. If I describe Brautigans [sic] as a hippie-surrealist, you will probably want to run a mile, but don't; his quirky, meandering fantasies are a delight, and I predict a major impact when he appears here.

Originally published separately by Four Seasons Foundation in San Francisco and later in paperback by Dell (1969), these avant-garde works now popular with college students are amusing and readable. The two novels are reminiscent of Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight (Assoc. Bks., 1968) in their delineation of freaky people in an extraordinary world. Life and love are treated with uninhibited imagination, often engendering unexpected similes (". . . a roll of toilet paper, so old it looked like a relative, perhaps a cousin, to the Magna Carta"). The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, a volume of selected poems, abounds in surrealistic humor and startling earthiness. A good addition to large fiction collections.