US AUTHOR Tom Robbins, whose novels read like a hit of literary LSD, filled with fantastical characters, manic metaphors and counterculture whimsy, has died aged 92.
Robbins’ death last week was announced by his wife, Alexa Robbins on Facebook but did not cite a cause.
“He was surrounded by his family and loyal pets. Throughout these difficult last chapters, he was brave, funny and sweet,” Alexa Robbins wrote.
“He asked that people remember him by reading his books.”
Robbins indulged the hippie sensibilities of young people, starting in the early 1970s with books that had an overarching philosophy of what he called “serious playfulness” and a mandate that it should be pursued in the most outlandish ways possible.
He had a writing epiphany while reviewing a 1967 concert by the Doors and in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, wrote that minds were made for blowing.
Robbins’ works included Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction and Still Life With Woodpecker.
Robbins characters were over the top, off the wall and around the bend.
Among them were Sissy Hankshaw, the hitchhiker with the nine-inch thumbs in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and Switters, the pacifist CIA operative in love with a nun in Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates.
Skinny Legs and All featured a talking can of pork and beans, a dirty sock and Turn Around Norman, a performance artist whose act consisted of moving imperceptibly.
“What I try to do, among other things, is to mix fantasy and spirituality, sexuality, humour and poetry in combinations that have never quite been seen before in literature,” Robbins said in an interview with January magazine in 2000.
“And I guess when a reader finishes one of my books … 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.”
He was born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and grew up there and in Richmond, Virginia, in a family that he once described as “kind of a Southern Baptist version of The Simpsons”.
Robbins said he was dictating stories to his mother at age five and developed his writing skills further at Washington and Lee University in Virginia working on the school newspaper with Tom Wolfe, who would go on to write The Right Stuff.
