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| Tom Robbins photographed at home in La Conner, Wash., in July 1981 |
Author Tom Robbins, known for his novels that read like a literary trip, brimming with eccentric characters, wild metaphors, and countercultural whimsy, passed away on Sunday at the age of 92.
His wife, Alexa Robbins, shared the news on Facebook, though the cause of death was not mentioned. "He was surrounded by his family and loyal pets. Throughout these difficult last chapters, he was brave, funny, and sweet," she wrote. "He asked that people remember him by reading his books."
Robbins captured the spirit of the 1970s counterculture with books that championed “serious playfulness,” encouraging readers to approach life in the most outlandish ways possible. As he wrote in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, “Minds were made for blowing.”
Among his best-known works were Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction, and Still Life With Woodpecker. Robbins’ characters were larger-than-life, from Sissy Hankshaw, the hitchhiker with giant thumbs in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, to Switters, a pacifist CIA agent in love with a nun in Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Skinny Legs and All featured bizarrely humorous characters like a talking can of pork and beans and a dirty sock, alongside Turn Around Norman, a performance artist whose act was defined by minute, almost imperceptible movements.
“I try to mix fantasy, spirituality, sexuality, humor, and poetry in ways that haven’t quite been seen before in literature,” Robbins said in a 2000 interview. “When a reader finishes one of my books, I want them to feel the way they would after a Fellini film or a Grateful Dead concert.”
Born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, Robbins spent his early years in Richmond, Virginia, where he grew up in a family he once likened to a “Southern Baptist version of The Simpsons.” By age five, he was dictating stories to his mother, later honing his craft at Washington and Lee University, where he worked alongside Tom Wolfe, the future author of The Right Stuff.
Before becoming a novelist, Robbins worked as an editor, reporter, and critic in newspapers in Richmond and Seattle. In Seattle during the 1960s, he found a more progressive atmosphere. It was while reviewing a 1967 Doors concert that he had a breakthrough, realizing he had unlocked new creative freedom in his writing. In his 2014 memoir Tibetan Peach Pie, he wrote, "It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions."
Robbins’ first novel, Another Roadside Attraction (1971), was a quirky tale about the theft of the mummified, non-resurrected body of Jesus, which ends up at a hot dog stand. Five years later, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues cemented his cult status, following the journey of Sissy as she hitchhikes through a world of mysticism, sex, and drugs.
Known for his strong female characters, Robbins appealed particularly to women readers. Though beloved by the youth counterculture, his work was not widely embraced by the literary establishment, which often criticized his plots as formulaic and his style overly flamboyant.
Robbins wrote his books by hand on legal pads, producing only a few pages a day and never plotting in advance. His attempt to use an electric typewriter ended in him smashing it with a piece of wood. He was known for carefully choosing each word, believing that "language is not the frosting, it’s the cake," and filling his books with colorful, vivid metaphors.
In Skinny Legs and All, he wrote, “Word spread like a skin disease in a nudist colony.” In Jitterbug Perfume, he described a falling man as descending "like a sack of meteorites addressed special delivery to gravity.”
Robbins, who had three children, spent his final years with his wife Alexa in La Conner, Washington, a small town located 70 miles north of Seattle.
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