Trout Fishing in America

Richard Brautigan once said "I've always wanted to write a book that ends with the word mayonnaise." And he did- Trout Fishing in America is his abstract literary classic. The book contains a series of anecdotes broken into chapters, with the same characters often reappearing from story to story. The phrase "Trout Fishing in America" is used in multiple ways: it is the title of the book, a character, a hotel, the act of fishing itself, a modifier (one character is named "Trout Fishing in America Shorty"), etc. Brautigan uses the theme of trout fishing as a point of departure for thinly veiled and often comical critiques of mainstream American society and cluture. Several symbolic objects, such as a mayonnaise jar, a Ben Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, trout, etc. reappear throughout the book.