Richard Fariña

Richard Fariña ( born March 8, 1937 in Brooklyn, New York, † April 30, 1966 in Carmel, California ) was an American writer and musician.

Life

His father was Cuban, his mother Irish; He thus spent in Cuba, Ireland and Brooklyn his childhood. Presumably, he was active in the 1950s in the IRA and also on the Cuban revolution in 1959, he was apparently involved. From 1957 to 1959 he studied at Cornell University, where he became friends with Thomas Pynchon, and wrote poems and short stories for the University of Piety Cornell Writer, whose editors Pynchon counted. In 1959, he was referred briefly to the university because he had participated in protests against the prudish university administration that oversaw strict about the morality on campus. From 1959 to 1963 he lived in New York, London and Paris; In 1960 he married the folk singer Carolyn Hester. However, the marriage did not last long. In 1963 he married Mimi Baez ( born April 30, 1945, † 18 July 2001), the sister of folk singer Joan Baez, and settled with her in California.

A few days after the publication of his first novel, he was killed in 1966 as a passenger in a motorcycle accident fatal. Mimi Fariña died on 18 July 2001 of lung cancer.

Works

The musical work

From his first wife Carolyn Hester learned Fariña, the mountain dulcimer to play a -forgotten plucked instrument from the Appalachian Mountains, and contributed significantly to its revival. In 1963, he took with Eric Von Schmidt on his first folk album, which also Bob Dylan participated.

After his marriage to Mimi Baez, the couple appeared together, including in 1965 at the legendary Newport Folk Festival. In 1965 she released two albums, Celebrations for a Grey Day and Reflections in a Crystal Wind.

The literary work

Richard Fariñas poems and short stories were printed in the early 1960s by various magazines; he also wrote several plays, but these are forgotten.

In 1960 he began work on his first novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, which was published in 1966, and today is considered a classic of the Beat literature. This picaresque novel tells the story of hippies Gnossos Pappadopoulis, which - as Fariña itself - among other things, student protests and the Cuban Revolution participates. 1983 Pynchon wrote a very personal embossed introduction for the novel.

A collection of his previously unpublished writings, published in 1969 under the title Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone.