Tom Robbins was a novelist known for quirky cult favorites like “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Skinny Legs and All.”
- Died: February 9, 2025 (Who else died on February 9?)
- Details of death: Died at his home in La Conner, Washington at the age of 92.
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Tom Robbins’s legacy
Via his eight novels and a handful of other notable works, Robbins became known for his surrealist wordplay and surprising metaphors. In “Skinny Legs and All,” he compared a rainy sky to “bad banana baby food,” while in “Jitterbug Perfume,” he offered the inscrutable sentence “The shaman grinned like a weasel running errands for the moon.”
Born in North Carolina and later raised in Virginia, Robbins majored in journalism at Washington and Lee University before serving in the U.S. Air Force. He worked for the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper before making a move to Seattle. The Pacific Northwest became his adopted home and the region with which he was most associated. Robbins was art critic for the Seattle Times, then wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer while writing his first novel.
“Another Roadside Attraction” was published in 1971, telling the story of a hippie couple running a hotdog stand and roadside zoo. Called the “quintessential novel of the 1960s” by Rolling Stone, “Another Roadside Attraction” initially faltered with audiences but gained traction with the release of a paperback edition. When Robbins published his second novel, 1976’s “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” it cemented his status as a chronicler of the counter-culture. More than 15 years later, it was adapted into a movie, written and directed by Gus Van Sant. The 1993 film’s resoundingly poor reception suggests that maybe Robbins’ words and ideas were better suited for the page than the screen; no one has screen-adapted any of his other novels.
Robbins typically took several years to write a book, and his next, “Still Life with Woodpecker,” was published in 1980. He followed it with “Jitterbug Perfume,” “Skinny Legs and All,” “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas,” “Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates,” and “Villa Incognito.” In addition to his novels, Robbins also wrote the children’s book, “B Is for Beer,” inspired by a New Yorker cartoon that suggested it was a bad idea to write a children’s book about beer. He later worked with singer-songwriter Ben Lee to adapt it into a stage musical. Robbins’ most recent work was the 2014 autobiography “Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life.”
Notable quote
“What I try to do, among other things, is to mix fantasy and spirituality, sexuality, humor and poetry in combinations that have never quite been seen before in literature. And I guess when a reader finishes one of my books — provided the reader does finish the book — I would like for him or her to be in the state that they would be in after a Fellini film or a Grateful Dead concert. Which is to say that they’ve encountered the lifeforce in a large, irrepressible and unpredictable way and as a result their sense of wonder has been awakened and all of their possibilities have been expanded.” — from a 2000 interview for January magazine
Tributes to Tom Robbins
Full obituary: The New York Times
