Tom Robbins, whose cosmically comic novels about gargantuan-thumbed hitchhikers, stoned secret agents and mystic stockbrokers caught hold of millions of readers in the 1970s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in La Conner, Wash. He was 92.
His son Fleetwood confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.
Alongside works by Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins paperbacks, dog-eared and torn, were common sights on the bookshelves and bedside milk crates of the late hippie era, between the tail end of the Vietnam War and the rise of Ronald Reagan’s America. He became one of the rare writers to achieve both a cult following and mega-best-seller status.
With their meandering plots, pop-philosophical asides and frequent jabs at social convention and organized religion, Mr. Robbins’s books were the perfect accompaniment to acid trips, Grateful Dead shows and weekend yoga retreats, long before those things became middle-class and mainstream.
Though he kept writing into the 21st century, he continually chose titles that emanated the era’s Day-Glo whimsy, like “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1976), “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas” (1994) and “Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates” (2000).
His story lines were secondary and hard to explain; one reads a Tom Robbins novel for the verve of a well-wrought sentence, not a taut narrative. His literary currency was exaggeration, irony, bathos and the comic mythopoetic, combined for an effect that was truly his own.
Take a representative line like this, from “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” his second novel: “An afternoon squeezed out of Mickey’s mousy snout, an afternoon carved from mashed potatoes and lye, an afternoon scraped out of the dog’s dish of meteorology.”
Weird, nostalgic, vaguely unsettling — whatever one calls it, fans could not get enough.
His first book, “Another Roadside Attraction” (1971), received critical praise (Rolling Stone called it “the quintessential novel of the 1960s”) and, after an initial flop in hardback, the novel took off in paperback. By the time “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” appeared, five years later, “Another Roadside Attraction” had sold more than 100,000 copies.
Mr. Robbins kept his growing army of fans at arm’s length. Extremely private, he rarely sat for interviews or stood for photographs, and he only occasionally left his home, in the tugboat town of La Conner, north of Seattle.
He wrote slowly — pen, longhand, notepads — and agonized over each sentence, sometimes spending an hour on a single line. He rarely set his story out ahead of time, preferring to let his instincts and imagination carry him forward over a roadbed of well-turned words.
“I don’t know how to write a novel,” he told The Seattle Weekly in 2006. “I couldn’t tell you how to write a novel; it’s a new adventure every time I begin one, and I like it that way. I rarely have even the vaguest sense of plot when I begin a book.”
Mr. Robbins claimed to draw inspiration from Asian philosophy and Greek myths — not as source material, but as paradigms for thinking through how to represent his take on reality.
“Reviewers also describe my work as ‘cartoonish,’ which I take as a compliment, because I love cartooning, and cartooning is very Greek,” he told The Seattle Weekly. “The creators of the Greek myths worked like cartoonists, painting in big bold strokes without a lot of physical or psychological detail.”
Though he was often identified as a Seattle writer, he was born and raised in the South, and even 50 years after moving to the Pacific Northwest, a bit of a twang remained — long I’s becoming ahs, g’s droppin’ like mayflies.
“I’m descended from a long line of preachers and policemen,” he told High Times magazine in 2002. “Now, it’s common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way as to convince otherwise rational people that they’re factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally.”
His original fan base drew from the twentysomethings of the hippie era and its aftermath; as he kept writing, that base stayed the same age.
As was the case for Mr. Vonnegut or Hermann Hesse, one of Mr. Robbins’s idols, his careening sensibility and hyperimaginative style burrowed deep into the minds of youthful readers, but their appeal, alongside that of jam bands and psychoactive drugs, often curdled as fans moved toward middle age.
Though his books continued to debut on the New York Times best-seller list, critics increasingly demeaned him as a relic of the 1960s, a dig to which he took great offense. He expressed even more frustration with critics who insisted that he choose between humor and gravity, as if the two were mutually exclusive.
And indeed his work, especially his early books, was not merely nostalgic fluff. Their ridiculous sentences and shaggy-dog plots obscured serious literary ingenuity, while he was decades ahead of the pack in taking on themes about ecology, feminism and religion.
“What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness,” he told The New York Times in 1993. “One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.”
Thomas Eugene Robbins was born on July 22, 1932, in Blowing Rock, N.C., a small town northeast of Asheville, and later moved with his family to the suburbs outside Richmond, Va. His father, George, worked for an electrical company, and his mother, Katherine (Robinson) Robbins, was a nurse. Both his grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers.
It was, he later said, the perfect beginning to a long literary career, which he traced to his earliest imaginative scribblings at age 5.
As a teenager he told his parents he wanted to be a novelist. His father, hoping to push his son toward a more practical career, persuaded him to enroll at Washington and Lee University, a Virginia school known for its journalism program. As a sports reporter for the campus newspaper, he was edited by Tom Wolfe.
Mr. Robbins left after his sophomore year, convinced that more time in the classroom would do nothing for his writing career. He enlisted in the Air Force, which sent him to South Korea as a meteorologist; he later said most of his time was spent fencing black-market toiletries.
After his discharge in 1957, he returned to Richmond, where he enrolled in the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) and developed a local reputation as a coffeehouse poet.
He also worked as a copy editor for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, a job he continued after graduating with a degree in journalism in 1959.
But he chafed under the restrictions of Jim Crow-era Richmond, including a prohibition at the newspaper against printing photographs of Black people — a transgression he nevertheless committed several times.
Eventually, it all got to be too much, and he moved to what seemed like the farthest point from Richmond in the Lower 48 states: Seattle.
He entered a graduate program in Far East studies at the University of Washington and went to work for The Seattle Times, first as an editor and then as an art critic. He also hosted a bohemian-inflected radio show called “Notes From the Underground.”
In 1963, he ingested 300 micrograms of pharmaceutical-grade lysergic acid diethylamide — his first LSD trip. It was, he said, life changing and life affirming. He quit his job to write freelance for underground newspapers.
He developed a local reputation as an offbeat writer, but it wasn’t until 1967, when he reviewed a concert by the Doors, that he found his style, inspired by the liberating otherworldliness of Jim Morrison and his band. He moved to La Conner and began to write a novel.
After publishing “Another Roadside Attraction” in 1971, he settled into a pace of about a book every five years, writing eight novels, a story collection, a novella and, most recently, a memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life” (2014).
Most of his novels were optioned by Hollywood, even though Mr. Robbins considered them largely unfilmable. He was proved right when the director Gus Van Sant released his version of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” in 1993; Caryn James of The Times, among others, dismissed it as “tortured” and “worked over.”
Mr. Robbins’ first three marriages ended in divorce. He married Alexa D’Avalon, a psychic, in 1994. Along with his son, from a previous marriage, she survives him, as do two other sons, Rip and Kirk, also from his previous marriages; and a grandson.
One of the keys to his lasting success with fans was the same thing that irked many of his critics: Even as he (and they) aged, he retained the same philosophical goofiness that defined his earliest writing — though he resisted calling it irreverence.
“I’m extremely reverent; it just depends what I’m looking at,” he told The Times in 2014. “From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.”
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