Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan, the Love Generation’s prickly and whimsical poet-novelist, died what the sheriff’s report termed an “unattended death” on September 16, 1984. Having committed suicide with one of his beloved Smith & Wesson revolvers, Brautigan was not discovered in his home in Bolinas, California until October 25, at which point he needed to be “scooped[ed] up with a shovel”.

 ...  Brautigan always carried the seed of alcoholism, but success enabled it to flourish. Jubilee Hitchhiker becomes a story of decline when Brautigan builds a house outside Livingston, Montana – “twenty-four bars and an equal number of churches” – to live among a macho milieu of hard drinkers, gunslingers and philanderers including Thomas McGuane, Peter Fonda, Jimmy Buffett ...

 ... He became every host’s nightmare: “One, he brought uninvited guests. Two, he was already drunk. Three, he had a .357 Magnum with him”. 

 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1252534.ece