What’s essential to Brautigan’s life and work had so little to do with the sixties. The hippie California he moved to and became famous in was an outlandish trope for the future and a new society, but Brautigan was a solitary and his sentences were broken from the beginning and never found the sort of healing expansion Carver eventually arrived at. Carver’s sentences discovered generosity and grew longer late in his career; Brautigan’s didn’t.
