Tom Robbins, ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ creator, dies at 92
Writer Tom Robbins, whose novels learn like a success of literary LSD, full of fantastical characters, manic metaphors and counterculture whimsy, died Sunday. He was 92.
Robbins’ dying was introduced by his spouse, Alexa Robbins, on Fb. The publish didn’t cite a trigger.
“He was surrounded by his household and dependable pets. All through these tough final chapters, he was courageous, humorous and candy,” Alexa Robbins wrote. “He requested that folks bear in mind him by studying his books.”
Robbins indulged the hippie sensibilities of younger individuals beginning within the early Seventies with books that had an overarching philosophy of what he referred to as “severe playfulness” and a mandate that it ought to be pursued in essentially the most outlandish methods attainable.
As he wrote in “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas:” “Minds have been made for blowing.”
Robbins’ works included “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” “One other Roadside Attraction” and “Nonetheless Life With Woodpecker.”
Robbins’ characters have been excessive, off the wall and across the bend. Amongst them have been Sissy Hankshaw, the hitchhiker with the 9-inch thumbs in “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” and Switters, the pacifist CIA operative in love with a nun in “Fierce Invalids Dwelling from Sizzling Climates.” “Skinny Legs and All” featured a speaking can of pork and beans, a grimy sock and Flip Round Norman, a efficiency artist whose act consisted of shifting imperceptibly.
“What I attempt to do, amongst different issues, is to combine fantasy and spirituality, sexuality, humor and poetry in mixtures which have by no means fairly been seen earlier than in literature,” Robbins mentioned in an interview with January journal in 2000. “And I suppose when a reader finishes one among my books … I would love for her or him to be within the state that they’d be in after a Fellini movie or a Grateful Useless live performance.”
He was born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and grew up there and in Richmond, Virginia, in a household that he as soon as described as “sort of a Southern Baptist model of ‘The Simpsons.’” Robbins mentioned he was dictating tales to his mom at age 5 and developed his writing expertise additional at Washington and Lee College in Virginia engaged on the college newspaper with Tom Wolfe, who would go on to write down “The Proper Stuff” and “The Electrical Kool-Support Acid Check.”
From newspapers to novels
Robbins labored as an editor, reporter and critic for newspapers in Richmond and Seattle, the place he moved within the Sixties in quest of a extra progressive environment than the South supplied. He had a writing epiphany whereas reviewing a 1967 live performance by the Doorways.
“It had jimmied the lock on my language field and smashed the final of my literary inhibitions,” he wrote within the 2014 memoir “Tibetan Peach Pie.” “After I learn over the paragraphs I’d written that midnight, I detected an ease, a freedom of expression, a syntax concurrently wild and exact.”
What got here subsequent was 1971’s “One other Roadside Attraction,” the roundabout story of how the mummified, unresurrected physique of Jesus was stolen from the Vatican and ended up at a sizzling canine stand within the U.S. Northwest. 5 years later, his second guide, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” by which Sissy hitchhiked her approach via a world of intercourse, medication and mysticism, made him a cult favourite.
His novels typically had robust feminine protagonists, which made him particularly fashionable with girls readers. And whereas he appealed to the youth tradition, the literary institution by no means warmed to Robbins. Critics mentioned his plots have been formulaic and his model overwrought.
Robbins wrote his books in longhand on authorized pads, producing solely a few pages a day and with nothing plotted upfront. An try at utilizing an electrical typewriter ended with the creator bashing it with a bit of lumber.
He labored over phrase choice and mentioned he preferred to “remind reader and author alike that language is just not the frosting, it’s the cake.” Consequently, his works have been overflowing with wild-eyed metaphors.
“Phrase unfold like a pores and skin illness in a nudist colony,” he wrote in “Skinny Legs and All.” In “Jitterbug Fragrance” he described a falling man as taking place “like a sack of meteorites addressed particular supply to gravity.”
Robbins, who had three youngsters, lived along with his spouse, Alexa, in La Conner, Washington, 70 miles north of Seattle.
