Description
Richard Fariña’s legend has always carried the strange momentum of unfinished work. Musician, novelist, political wanderer, folklorist, poet, and one of the defining spirits orbiting the American counterculture of the 1960s, Fariña died in a motorcycle crash in 1966 at just twenty-nine years old — only days after the publication of his now-classic novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. What remained afterward was the mythology: Cornell, Greenwich Village coffeehouses, Joan Baez, Mimi Fariña, folk clubs, revolutionary politics, motorcycles, Europe, Cuba, a close friendship with Thomas Pynchon, and the lingering sense that American literature lost someone genuinely singular before his real body of work had even begun.
Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone attempts to gather the fragments left behind. With a foreword by Joan Baez and notes by Mimi Fariña, the book combines essays, unpublished writing, lyrics, reflections, and personal material into something that feels part memoir, part literary archaeology, and part memorial object. Even the dust jacket design captures the atmosphere of the late 1960s perfectly — psychedelic illustration colliding with intimate portraiture. The rear panel photograph of Richard and Mimi together may be one of the most emotionally resonant images associated with the folk era: youthful, spontaneous, idealistic, and unknowingly standing at the edge of tragedy.
An essential companion volume for collectors of Beat and counterculture literature, folk music history, Joan Baez material, and the brief but lasting world Richard Fariña left behind.
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