Tom Robbins, Counterculture Scribe of ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,' Dead at 92

Yahoo

10-02-2025

Tom Robbins, the celebrated author whose novels included Skinny Legs and All, Jitterbug Perfume, and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, died Sunday, Feb. 9, The New York Times reports. He was 92.
Robbins died at his home in La Conner, Washington. His son Fleetwood confirmed the news but did not provide a cause of death.
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At once an underground favorite and a best-seller, Robbins' comic novels — with their fantastical stories and far-out musings — were distinctly of the counterculture and soon became part of its fabric. He rarely plotted out his books, choosing instead to see where his imagination and characters led him.
'I've always wanted to lead a life of enchantment and writing is part of that,' Robbins told Rolling Stone in 1977. '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.'
Robbins published his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction (the 'quintessential counterculture novel,' RS declared), in 1971. He would publish seven more, each arriving about four or five years after the last. His final novel, Villa Incognito, arrived in 2003, though he subsequently published a short story collection, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, in 2005; a novella, B Is for Beer, in 2009; and a memoir (or 'un-memoir,' as he called it) Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, in 2014.
'Heartbroken to hear about the passing of Tom Robbins,' actress Marisa Tomei wrote on Instagram. 'His books weren't just stories — they were wild, mind-expanding adventures that made you see the world differently. His words were playful, rebellious, and full of magic, reminding us to embrace the strange, chase beauty, and never take life too seriously.'
Born July 22, 1932 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, but raised largely outside Richmond, Virginia, Robbins showed a penchant for writing from a young age and expressed his desire to become a novelist as a teenager. His parents, however, pushed him more towards journalism, a career he pursued first in college and then picked up again after a stint in the Air Force.
But two distinctly Sixties experiences re-routed Robbins back to his ultimate calling. An LSD trip in 1963 convinced him to quit his day job at a Seattle newspaper and start writing for underground publications. Then, in 1967, while reviewing an awe-inspiring Doors concert, Robbins said he 'finally found [his] voice' and set about writing his first novel a few weeks later.
While Another Roadside Attraction failed to garner much attention when it was first published in hardback, the paperback edition steadily became a word-of-mouth hit, especially on college campuses. By the time his next novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, arrived in 1976, Robbins was a well-known quantity garnering both backlash and raves (including from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, who called Cowgirls 'a piece of working magic, warm, funny and sane').
Throughout the rest of his career, Robbins rarely deviated from his distinct style, retaining his devoted fans though sometimes exasperating critics. Despite their myriad out-there elements, his books were often optioned for films, but only one was ever made — Gus Van Sant's 1993 adaptation of Cowgirls, which was a critical and commercial flop.
As a parting word in his 1977 Rolling Stone interview, Robbins succinctly captured his singular style and creative approach. 'You can tell people that my goal is to write novels that are like a basket of cherry tomatoes,' he said, 'when you bite into a paragraph, you don't know which way the juice is going to squirt.'
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