Counterculture author Tom Robbins has died
Tom Robbins, a 1970s counterculture author hailed as “the most dangerous writer in the world” by a leading Italian critic and named one of the 100 Best Writers of the 20th Century by Writer’s Digest Magazine in 2000, has died. He was 92.
His son Fleetwood confirmed his death Sunday to the New York Times. No cause was cited.
Born Thomas Eugene Robbins, the iconoclastic American author was known for his silly, irreverent novels from the 1970s and ’80s. In them, characters burst with life through his wordplay and fervent philosophical opinions. The best-selling author of more than 11 books, including classics like “Another Roadside Attraction,” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Jitterbug Perfume,” morphed the 1960s optimistic hippie sensibility into bizarre and playful stories.
His first novel, “Another Roadside Attraction,” was published in 1971 when Robbins was 39–more than three decades after declaring to his parents, at age 5, that he’d be a writer. The novel became an underground classic.
His subsequent novel in 1976, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” spotlighted the dynamic Sissy Hankshaw, a woman with supersized thumbs who capitalizes on her mutation by becoming a hitchhiker. American novelist Thomas Pynchon called it “a piece of working magic, warm, funny and sane.”
The story was adapted into a 1993 film directed by Gus Van Sant, starring Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves, and was narrated by Robbins. It received poor reviews and was a commercial failure.
Though quoted as once saying that he’d never write a memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, published in 2014,” stitched together stories of his extraordinary life. From his childhood in the Appalachian mountains during the Great Depression to the ’60 psychedelic revolution in the West Coast, the memoir, he told New York Times Magazine in 2014, “was precipitated by a desire to please women.”
“His stories were just as bit as magical as his writing, where you just can’t tell the boundaries of reality and fantasy,” said George Mason, co-founder of Authors Road. Mason and Salli Slaughter, his wife, interviewed Robbins in his home in 2011 and were charmed as much by his playfulness as they were awed by stories from his past.
“He’s just an incredibly loving soul,” said actress Debra Winger, a pen pal and close friend of Robbins’. “There’s nothing better than having Tom as a friend because he’s just always rooting for you.”
The two met in the late ’70s and quickly became friends. “He sort of just walked out of his books,” said Winger, who was continuously awed by his “unbelievable positivity.”
“I never saw Tommy dark or in despair….he could just see the light side of anything. He could write about the other but he could always see the light side… He’s just a sunny, sunny guy, and I think he lived his life exactly the way he wanted to.”
And whenever he could, he manifested the same light and silliness from his novels into reality.
Robbins was particular about how and where his editors read his book manuscripts. His preferred editorial conference location was at Two Bunch Palms, a resort and spa near Desert Hot Springs. Until his editors soaked in the pool and had a massage, Robbins refused to show them his work.
“They weren’t allowed to read them anywhere else,” Winger recalled. And his editors, though at first begrudgingly, would comply. “These were the kinds of demands he made on you that were good for you as well.”
Nicknamed Tommy Rotten in his childhood, Robbins was born July 22, 1932 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina to George Thomas Robbins, a company executive, and Katherine Robinson, a nurse. Both his grandparents were baptist preachers. At 10, his family moved to eastern Virginia. He was the oldest of four, including twins Mary and Mariane, and Rena, who died after being administered an ether overdose at the hospital before Robbins was 7.
In the early 1950s, Robbins attended Washington and Lee University in Virginia briefly studying journalism and writing for the college newspaper under Tom Wolfe, its sports editor at the time. After his sophomore year he dropped out to find himself and embarked on a “pre-beatnik hitchhiking” trip and worked construction jobs.
Weeks before his 21st birthday, he enlisted in the United States Air Force and was sent to South Korea to teach meteorology to the South Korean Air Force.
After being discharged, he returned to the U.S. in 1957 and enrolled at Richmond Professional Institute–which later became Virginia Commonwealth University. There, he was a columnist and editor for his college newspaper. He then joined the staff on the Richmond Times-Dispatch as a copy editor.
But Robbins didn’t jive with the newspaper’s conservative slant. Eventually, after some mounting tensions with its managing editor, he left for Washington. He settled there for the rest of his life.
“Seattle was the farthest place from Richmond on the map without leaving the country,” he once told Rolling Stone. “And I couldn’t afford to leave the country.” But his appeal for the western country stemmed also from his art-school studies. He was particularly intrigued by the school of mystic painters inspired by the West coast’s landscapes.
By early 1962, Robbins had moved to Seattle. He took a job working for The Seattle Times as an assistant features editor, eventually becoming an art critic and an art columnist for Seattle Magazine.
The following summer, in 1963, Robbins experienced “the most rewarding day of my life.” On July 16 of that year, he took LSD. His encounter with psychedelics, he said, was an impetus that resulted in quitting his Seattle Times gig.
“I called in well one day,” he wrote in his memoir. “What do you mean, well?” his editor responded. “Well, I’ve been sick ever since I’ve been working there, and now I’m well, and I won’t be coming in anymore.”
And he up and left to New York in search of others who had taken the drug. He befriended psychedelic advocate Timothy Leary, but it wasn’t long before he got tired of the bustling city and returned to Seattle, taking a brief stint as a weekly radio host.
Robbins’ writing earned him the 1997 Lifetime Achievement Award in the arts at Seattle’s Bumbershoot arts festival and the 2012 Literary Lifetime Achievement prize from the Library of Virginia. But his goals as a writer weren’t ever to garner accolades or top-tier prizes.
Instead, his objective was to “twine ideas and images into big subversive pretzels of life, death and goodliness on the chance that they might help keep the world lively, and give it the flexibility to endure,” he once said.
His words and imaginations were his incantations to the world, and to himself.
“I’ve always wanted to lead a life of enchantment,” he said in a Rolling Stone interview, “and writing is part of that. Magic is practical and pragmatic–it’s making connections between objects or events in the most unusual ways. When you do that, the universe becomes a very exciting place. I’m a romantic, and I don’t apologize for that. I think it’s as valid a way of looking at life as any. And a hell of a lot more fun.”
A notoriously private and mysterious man, Robbins spent his life enchanting readers with clever wordplay and bizarre, highly whimsical stories that oozed with philosophical musings and quips.
But his greatest gift in life, he wrote in his memoir, was not his writing. It was his ability to live in two distinct worlds concurrently: in the planets of imagination and reality.
Robbins is survived by Alexa, his third wife of more than 30 years; and three sons from his previous marriages.