Author Tom Robbins, whose novels read as a success of LSD literary, full of fantastic characters, manic metaphors and counterculture fantasy, died on Sunday. I was 92 years old.
Robbins’ death was announced by his wife, Alexa Robbins, on Facebook. The publication did not cite a cause.
“He was surrounded by his family and his loyal pets. Throughout the last last chapters, he was brave, fun and sweet, ”Alexa Robbins wrote. “He asked people to remember him reading their books.”
Robbins realized the hippie sensitivity of the young people who began in the early 1970s with books that had a general philosophy of what he called “serious joy” and a mandate that he should continue in the most extravagant way possible.
As he wrote in “Half Sleep in Pajamas de Rana:” “The minds were made to blow.”
Robbins’ works included “even Cowgirls get the blues”, “another road attraction” and “dead nature with carpenter birds.”
Robbins’ characters were above, out of the wall and around the curve. Among them were Sissy Hankshaw, the autoestopist with the 9 -inch thumbs in “even the cowboys get the blues”, and with the presentation, the pacifist operation of the CIA in love with a nun in “fierce invalids to the house of hot climates.” “Skinny Legs and All” presented a spell of pork and beans, a dirty sock and a turn to Norman, a performance artist whose act was to move imperceptibly.
“What I try to do, among other things, is I suppose that when a reader ends one of my books … I would like him or her to be in the state in which they would be after a Fellini movie or a grateful concert. “
He was born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and grew up there and Richmond, Virginia, in a family that once described as “a kind of baptist version of the southern ‘The Simpsons'”. Robbins said he was making stories to his mother at age 5 and developed his writing skills at the University of Washington and Lee in Virginia working in the school newspaper with Tom Wolfe, who would continue writing “the right things” and “the test of Electric Kool-Aid acid “.
Of newspapers to novels
Robbins worked as an editor, reporter and newspaper critic in Richmond and Seattle, where he moved in the 1960s in search of a more progressive atmosphere that the south offered. He had an epiphany of writing while reviewing a 1967 concert next to the doors.
“I had shaken the lock of my language box and broke the last of my literary inhibitions,” he wrote in the 2014 memories “Tibetan Peach Pie”. “When I read the paragraphs that I wrote that midnight, I detected ease, freedom of expression, a simultaneously wild and precise syntax.”
What arrived later was “another attraction on the road” of 1971, the story of how the body of Jesus mummified and uncompassed was stolen from the Vatican and ended in a hot dog stand in the northwest of the United States. Five years later, his second book, “Even cowboys get the blues,” in which Sissy made way through a world of sex, drugs and mysticism, made him a favorite of cult.
His novels often had strong female protagonists, which made him especially popular among women readers. And while appealing to the youth culture, the literary establishment never warmed Robbins. Critics said their plots were formulated and their overloaded style.
Robbins wrote his books in Longhand On Legal Pads, producing only a couple of pages a day and with nothing drawn in advance. An attempt to use an electric typewriter ended with the author who attacked him with a piece of wood.
He worked on the selection of words and said he liked “remembering the reader and the writer that the language is not the glaze, it is the cake.” As a result, his works were full of wild eyes metaphors.
“The voice was extended as a skin disease in a nudist colony,” he wrote in “thin legs and everything.” In “Jitterbug perfume,” he described a man who fell when he fell “as a meteoritic sack addressed the special delivery to gravity.”
Robbins, who had three children, lived with his wife, Alexa, in La Conner, Washington, 70 miles north of Seattle.
