In Watermelon Sugar was published by the Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco, in 1968, in a small first printing. Like Trout Fishing in America, it was written years earlier (1964) and published only after the success of Brautigan’s first collection made a second book commercially viable. The novella is barely 100 pages and reads like a fairy tale — a quality that made it enormously popular with the commune movement and equally unpopular with critics who wanted fiction to engage with the contemporary world.
The Book
The narrator lives in a place called iDEATH — a communal settlement where the buildings are made of watermelon sugar, the sun changes colour daily (Monday is red, Tuesday is gold, Wednesday is grey), and life is simple, beautiful, and eerily tranquil. The narrator makes shingles from watermelon sugar and writes in a notebook. He has recently ended a relationship with Margaret and begun one with Pauline.
The settlement’s peace is threatened by inBOIL, a gang of wild men who live in the Forgotten Works — a vast dump of artefacts from a previous civilisation. Their leader, also named inBOIL, disrupts a communal gathering by cutting off his own fingers, then his nose and ears, and finally his thumb — bleeding to death while insisting that the people of iDEATH are “all dead” inside. Margaret, sympathetic to inBOIL’s rage, hangs herself.
The community responds to these horrors with remarkable composure. They clean up, plant flowers, and continue their placid existence. The novel ends with a dance by lantern light.
Utopia and Its Discontents
The novella can be read as a utopian fable — iDEATH as the ideal commune, a life of simplicity and beauty — but its undercurrents are deeply disturbing. The community’s tranquillity depends on repression: they have forgotten the past (the Forgotten Works), they respond to inBOIL’s suicide with detachment, and Margaret’s death barely ripples the surface of their contentment. Brautigan’s pastoral is not innocent — it is an innocence purchased by the refusal to remember, to feel, to grieve.
This ambiguity is the novella’s great strength. Readers who take it at face value as a hippie fantasy miss the melancholy at its core. The watermelon-sugar world is beautiful precisely because it is impossible — a dream that can exist only by excluding everything that makes life difficult and real.
Collecting In Watermelon Sugar
First edition (1968, Four Seasons Foundation): Small first printing (wrappers).
Approximate market values:
- Fine first printing (wrappers): $1,000–$3,000
- Signed first edition: $3,000–$8,000
Value trajectory: Appreciated alongside the broader Brautigan market. The novella’s cult status and its brevity (attractive as a gift book and a decorative shelf item) keep demand steady. Signed copies are scarce and increasingly valuable. The Four Seasons Foundation printings are the desirable bibliographic items; the subsequent Dell paperbacks are common and inexpensive.