A Confederate General from Big Sur was published by Grove Press in 1964 — Richard Brautigan’s first novel, preceding Trout Fishing in America into print despite being written second. It sold poorly on initial publication (Grove printed fewer than 3,000 copies) and remained obscure until the enormous success of Trout Fishing (1967) sent readers back to discover everything Brautigan had written. It is now recognized as the beginning of one of the most distinctive voices in American fiction.
The Novel
Lee Mellon claims to be the great-great-grandson of Augustus Mellon, a Confederate general from Big Sur. Whether Augustus Mellon existed is uncertain — Lee’s research into his ancestry yields contradictory evidence, and the novel increasingly doesn’t care. The point is the claim: Lee lives as if he were descended from greatness, which in Brautigan’s universe is the same as being descended from greatness.
The narrator, Jesse, is drawn into Lee’s world — poverty, eccentricity, Big Sur’s wild coast, a series of comic misadventures involving stolen vegetables, borrowed money, and two young women who arrive and complicate everything. The plot, such as it is, resists summary because Brautigan’s fiction is not driven by plot but by voice, image, and the associative logic of a particular consciousness.
Style
The prose demonstrates Brautigan’s method fully formed: short chapters (some only a paragraph), unexpected metaphors deployed with deadpan seriousness, a tone that hovers between melancholy and absurdist comedy, and a persistent gentle surrealism that makes reality slightly unstable without ever tipping into fantasy.
The novel’s most famous structural feature is its ending — which offers multiple conclusions, including “186,000 Endings Per Second” (the speed of light), suggesting that the story continues in infinite parallel versions simultaneously. This postmodern gesture is achieved without postmodern heaviness; it feels like a joke, a shrug, and a philosophical statement simultaneously.
Context
Big Sur in the early 1960s was still wild — Henry Miller’s territory, the Beats’ refuge, not yet the tourist destination it would become. Brautigan lived in San Francisco but frequented the coast. The novel captures a specific moment in California bohemia: after the Beats, before the hippies, when it was possible to live on almost nothing and consider that a philosophical position.
Collecting A Confederate General from Big Sur
First edition (Grove Press, New York, 1964): Cream cloth binding with orange and blue lettering. Dust jacket with Civil War-era illustration.
Identification points:
- Grove Press imprint
- “First Printing” stated on copyright page
- 159 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $1,500–$4,000. The small first printing (under 3,000 copies), combined with Brautigan’s cult status and his suicide in 1984, makes this a genuinely scarce and sought-after book.
Signed copies: $3,000–$8,000. Brautigan was generous with signatures at readings during his lifetime.
Without jacket: $200–$500. Many copies survived without the fragile dust jacket.
As Brautigan’s first novel, it has the special authority of a debut — the moment when a wholly original voice first appeared in American fiction.