Tom Robbins, Whose Comic Novels Drew a Cult Following, Dies at 92

He combined pop philosophy and absurdist comedy to great success in bestselling books such as “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Skinny Legs and All.”

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 Sunday at his home in La Conner, Wash. He was 92.

His son Fleetwood confirmed the death, but would not say why.

Alongside Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan, and Ken Kesey, dog-eared Tom Robbins paperbacks were as common on bookshelves and bedside milk crates at the end of the Vietnam War and beginning of Ronald Reagan’s America. He was among a handful of writers who received both a cult following and a place on mega-bestseller lists.

With their twisty narratives, 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.

Although he continued 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 line of stories was 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-all combined for an effect that was truly his own.

Here is a typical sentence from that vein, taken from his second novel, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”: “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, and slightly offbeat-whatever description fits the novel-best, the readers devoured it all.
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 Convers, north of Seattle.

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. Mr. Robbins kept his growing army of fans at arm’s length.

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 said in 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 paradigms for thinking through how to represent his take on reality.

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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 2000. “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 was drawn from the twentysomethings of the hippie era and its aftermath as he kept writing, that base stayed the same age.

As was the case with the novelists Kurt Vonnegut and 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 was frustrated with critics who insisted that he choose between humor and gravity, as if the two were mutually exclusive.

Thomas Eugene Robbins, a renowned author, was known for his ridiculous sentences and shaggy-dog plots in his early books. Despite his literary ingenuity, his work often lacked serious themes, such as ecology, feminism, and religion. Robbins, born in 1932, resisted critics’ criticisms by stating that life is a commingling of the sacred and profane, good and evil.

Robbins, novelist, wanted to be a journalist when he began, but his father sent him to Washington and Lee University, and he eventually enlisted in the Air Force to serve in South Korea, where he fenced black-market toiletries. He was a coffeehouse poet when he returned to Richmond.

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 then enrolled in the graduate program for Far East studies at the University of Washington, where he moved to The Seattle Times to edit and eventually be an art critic. He was also hosting a radio show bohemian inflected with a title of “Notes From the Underground”.

In 1963, he took 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 gained a local reputation as a quirky writer, but it was not until 1967 that he found his style, which was inspired by the liberating otherworldliness of Jim Morrison and his band, when he reviewed a Doors concert. He moved to La Conner and began writing a novel.

After publishing “Another Roadside Attraction” in 1971, he found a comfortable tempo of one every five years with eight novels, a story collection, a novella, and most recently a memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life” in 2014.

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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 was married four times and divorced three of his wives. He married a psychic, Alexa D’Avalon, in 1994. With his son from an earlier marriage, she survives him, as do two other sons, Rip and Kirk, from earlier marriages; and a grandson.

One of the secrets to his lasting popularity with fans was the same thing that drove so many of his critics nuts: Even as he (and they) grew older, he remained the same philosophical goofiness that defined his earliest writing — though he shied away from using the word 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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