Tom Robbins, who has died aged 92, was one of the last cult novelists to emerge from the 1960s. Often compared for their humour to Kurt Vonnegut or Richard Brautigan, his books took their place on the shelves alongside novels by Richard Farina, Peter S Beagle, Philip K Dick, Ken Kesey and Thomas Pynchon.
Rolling Stone magazine called his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction (1971), “the quintessential novel of the 60s”, but it did poorly until the paperback edition became a word-of-mouth bestseller. The next, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), was his biggest hit. Its heroine was Sissy Hankshaw, a world-class hitchhiker whose oversized thumbs lead her to the all-female Rubber Rose Ranch run by Bonanza Jellybean.
Pynchon wrote a blurb for it, saying, “I hope this book … winds up changing the brainscape of America, which sure could use it”. Instead, it wound up as a 1993 film by Gus Van Sant, one of the most-panned movies ever, in which Uma Thurman played Sissy.
Part of Robbins’s cult status reflected the slow gestation of his books. Over the course of 34 years he wrote only eight novels and though he would do reading tours after each one, he eschewed most interviews. I was lucky enough to sit down with him in 2001, as he promoted Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates, and he explained his unusual writing habits. “I never leave a sentence until it’s as good as I can make it, so it meets the soundness of whatever philosophical bullshit I might be propagating, and relates to the sentences which preceded it,” he said. “It’s slow, but the advantage is I don’t rewrite, or rather, I rewrite as I’m going along.”
As time went by, the critics tried to hang the 60s label as a millstone around Robbins’s neck, with Karen Karbo, reviewing Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas in 1994, claiming that “unless his work was imprinted on you when you were 19 and stoned, you’ll find him forever unreadable”. However, it was an epitaph that a growing readership failed to recognise.
Robbins claimed his brand of storytelling was inherited from his forebears, who were preachers and sheriffs. Born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, he grew up in Warsaw, Virginia. His father, George, was a power company executive; his mother, Katharine (nee Robinson), was a nurse, and both his grandfathers were Baptist preachers.
Facing disciplinary problems at Warsaw high school, he spent his final year at Hargrave military academy, playing basketball and winning the senior essay prize. Already intent on becoming a novelist, he studied journalism at Washington and Lee University but left after two years, again because of disciplinary problems. He then joined the US air force, serving as a meteorologist in Korea and for the Strategic Air Command in Kansas.
Discharged in 1957, he returned to Virginia, enrolling at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) while working on the night sports desk at the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper, joining there full-time as a copy editor after graduating. He left in 1962, after the paper objected to his using a photo of Sammy Davis Jr in the paper; their Jim Crow policies did not allow photos of black people. He then moved to Seattle, “as far away from Richmond as possible”, and worked at the Seattle Times as an art critic. A month later the arts editor suffered an ulcer and Robbins was editing the section; knowing nothing about classical music, he reviewed a performance of Rossini by riffing on the composer’s likeness to the actor Robert Mitchum.
In 1963 Robbins took acid for the first time. He quit the paper, made a pilgrimage to Greenwich Village, and returned to write for Seattle Magazine and host a weekly music show, Notes From the Underground, on KRAB radio.
He also wrote for Art Forum and Art in America, and in 1965 had a monograph published on the Pacific Northwest artist Guy Anderson. In 1967, after reviewing the Doors in Seattle’s local underground paper The Helix, Robbins felt he had finally found his voice, and began to write Another Roadside Attraction, a novel about a circus couple who turn an abandoned diner into Captain Kendrick’s Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve, housing an offbeat menagerie and the mummified corpse of Jesus, stolen from the Vatican.
Perhaps his best novels were Still Life With Woodpecker (1980), “a sort of love story” set inside a Camel cigarette pack, and Jitterbug Perfume (1984), in which a pair of duelling perfumers cross paths with a deposed eighth-century king and his consort, who seek immortality.
Most Robbins novels are classic journeys, drawing on the mythic archetypes of Joseph Campbell’s work, which he admired. Featuring oddly matched couples drawn to each other, they usually have female leads, with Fierce Invalids (2000) the first to feature a male protagonist, something Robbins had avoided lest the characters became too autobiographical.
A number of his books were optioned for films, but none since Cowgirls have been made. Thereafter his involvement in the cinematic world consisted of playing bit parts in various films, including Made in Heaven (1987), Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) and Breakfast of Champions (1999), all directed by his friend Alan Rudolph.
Robbins’s last novel was Villa Incognito in 2003. In 2005 there was a collection of essays, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, and in 2009 a novella, B for Beer. His final book was an autobiography, Tibetan Peach Pie (2014).
Robbins is survived by his fourth wife, the psychic and actor Alexa D’Avalon, and by three sons, Rip, Kirk and Fleetwood, from previous marriages.
• Thomas Eugene Robbins, novelist, born 22 July 1932; died 9 February 2025
