Latest news with #EvenCowgirlsGettheBlues'
Washington Post
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Tom Robbins, literary prankster-philosopher, dies at 92
NEW YORK — Tom Robbins, the novelist and prankster-philosopher who charmed and addled millions of readers with such screwball adventures as 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues' and 'Jitterbug Perfume,' has died. He was 92. Robbins' death was confirmed by his friend, the publishing executive Craig Popelars, who said the author died Sunday morning. Pronouncing himself blessed with 'crazy wisdom,' Robbins published eight novels and the memoir 'Tibetan Peach Pie' and looked fondly upon his world of deadpan absurdity, authorial commentary and zig zag story lines. No one had a wilder imagination, whether giving us a wayward heroine with elongated thumbs in 'Cowgirls' or landing the corpse of Jesus in a makeshift zoo in 'Another Roadside Attraction.' And no one told odder jokes on himself: Robbins once described his light, scratchy drawl as sounding 'as if it's been strained through Davy Crockett's underwear.' He could fathom almost anything except growing up. People magazine would label Robbins 'the perennial flower child and wild blooming Peter Pan of American letters,' who 'dips history's pigtails in weird ink and splatters his graffiti over the face of modern fiction.' A native of Blowing Rock, North Carolina who moved to Virginia and was named 'Most Mischievous Boy' by his high school, Robbins could match any narrative in his books with one about his life. There was the time he had to see a proctologist and showed up wearing a duck mask. (The doctor and Robbins became friends). He liked to recall the food server in Texas who unbuttoned her top and revealed a faded autograph, his autograph. Or that odd moment in the 1990s when the FBI sought clues to the Unabomber's identity by reading Robbins' novel 'Still Life with Woodpecker.' Robbins would allege that two federal agents, both attractive women, were sent to interview him. 'The FBI is not stupid!' he liked to say. 'They knew my weakness!' He also managed to meet a few celebrities, thanks in part to the film adaptation of 'Even Cowgirls,' which starred Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves, and to appearances in such movies as 'Breakfast of Champions' and 'Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.' He wrote of being Debra Winger's date to the 1991 Academy Awards ceremony and nearly killing himself at an Oscars after-party when — hoping to impress Al Pacino — he swallowed a glass of cologne. He had happier memories of checking into a hotel and being recognized by a young, pretty clerk, who raved about his work and ignored the man standing next to him, Neil Young. In Robbins' novels, the quest was all and he helped capture the wide open spirit of the 1960s in part because he knew the life so well. He dropped acid, hitchhiked coast to coast, traveled from Tanzania to the Himalayas and carried on with friends and strangers in ways he had no right to survive. He didn't rely on topical references to mark time, but on understanding the era from the inside. 'Faulkner had his inbred Southern gothic freak show, Hemingway his European battlefields and cafes, Melville his New England with its tall ships,' he wrote in his memoir, published in 2014. 'I had, it finally dawned on me, a cultural phenomenon such as the world had not quite seen before, has not seen since; a psychic upheaval, a paradigm shift, a widespread if ultimately unsustainable egalitarian leap in consciousness. And it was all very up close and personal.' His path to fiction writing had its own rambling, hallucinatory quality. He was a dropout from Washington and Lee University (Tom Wolfe was a classmate) who joined the Air Force because he didn't know what else to do. He moved to the Pacific Northwest in the early '60s and somehow was assigned to review an opera for the Seattle Times, becoming the first classical music critic to liken Rossini to Robert Mitchum. Robbins would soon find himself in a farcical meeting with conductor Milton Katims, making conversation by pretending he was working on his own libretto, 'The Gypsy of Issaquah,' named for a Seattle suburb. 'You must admit it had an operatic ring,' Robbins insisted. By the late 1960s, publishers were hearing about his antics and thought he might have a book in him. A Doubleday editor met with Robbins and agreed to pay $2,500 for what became 'Another Roadside Attraction.' Published in 1971, Robbins' debut novel sold little in hardcover despite praise from Graham Greene and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among others, but became a hit in paperback. 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues' came out in 1976 and eventually sold more than 1 million copies. 'Read solemnly, with expectations of conventional coherence, 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues' will disappoint,' Thomas LeClair wrote in The New York Times. 'Entered like a garage sale, poked through and picked over, 'Cowgirls' is entertaining and, like the rippled mirror over there by the lawn mower, often instructive. Tom Robbins is one of our best practitioners of high foolishness.' Domestic stability was another prolonged adventure; one ex-girlfriend complained 'The trouble with you, Tom, is that you have too much fun.' He was married and divorced twice, and had three children, before settling down with his third wife, Alexa d'Avalon, who appeared in the film version of 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.' Robbins' other books included 'Half Asleep in Frogs Pajamas,' 'Fierce Invalids Home from Home Climates,' 'Villa Incognito.' His honors included the Bumbershoot Golden Umbrella Award for Lifetime Achievement and being named by Writer's Digest as among the 100 best authors of the 20th century. But he cherished no praise more than a letter received from an unnamed woman. 'Your books make me laugh, they make think, they make me horny,' his fan informed him, 'and they make me aware of all the wonder in the world.'
Boston Globe
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Tom Robbins, whose comic novels drew a cult following, dies at 92
With their meandering plots, pop-philosophical asides, and frequent jabs at social convention and organized religion, Mr. Robbins' books were the perfect accompaniment to Grateful Dead shows and weekend yoga retreats, long before those things became middle-class and mainstream. Advertisement Though he kept writing into the 21st century, he continually chose titles that emanated the era's Day-Glo whimsy, including 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues' (1976), 'Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas' (1994) and 'Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates' (2000). Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up His storylines 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. Advertisement 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.' 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.' Advertisement His original fan base drew from the 20-somethings of the hippie era and its aftermath; as he kept writing, that base stayed the same age. As was the case for 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 bestseller 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 July 22, 1932, in Blowing Rock, N.C, a small town northeast of Asheville, and 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 grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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). Mr. Robbins's first three marriages ended in divorce. He married Alexa D'Avalon, a psychic, in 1994. Along with his son, from a previous marriage, and his wife, he leaves 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.' This article originally appeared in
Los Angeles Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Counterculture author Tom Robbins, known for his irreverent bestselling novels, dies at 92
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.
New York Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Tom Robbins, Whose Comic Novels Drew a Cult Following, Dies at 92
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, making him one of the rare writers to achieve both a cult following and mega-best-seller status, 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. 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 often curdled as fans moved toward middle age, alongside jam bands and psychoactive drugs. 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 at 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; 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, also from his previous marriages, Rip and Kirk; 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.'
