Few contemporary American writers have been subjected to as much laudatory abuse as Richard Brautigan who, having become famous in the 1960s, was made a cult figure for the hippy generation and was systematically refused recognition as a major novelist once the sentimental wave of the 'greening of America' had passed.

Marc Chénetier's study, originally published in 1983, was the first book to attempt to assess Brautigan's writing art which, far from weakening over the years, had become, amid critical indifference, more secure in its techniques, more all-encompassing in its strategy and more iconoclastic in its goals. In analysing most of Brautigan's fictional works in the light of his poetics, it examines the mechanisms of his metafictional and deconstructive offensive and indicates the direction in which Brautigan was moving at the time.