Tom Robbins, the bestselling novelist whose early books defined the 1960s for a generation and whose publishing career spanned more than 50 years, died Sunday at age 92, according to his wife.
She did not give the cause of his death.
Robbins, who called La Conner in Skagit County his home, was unclassifiable, and he liked it that way. He was a shy, dreamy kid who became a class clown and bad boy, a native Southerner who moved to Seattle from Virginia because “Seattle was the farthest place from Richmond on the map without leaving the country,” he told Rolling Stone in a 1977 interview. In his books he juggled the roles of writer, philosopher, renegade, mystic and comedian. Critical reviews of his books ranged from rapturous to disdainful, but he was a world-class storyteller and he inspired lifelong loyalty among his devoted fans. His motto, he said from time to time, was “joy in spite of everything.”
Robbins was born in Blowing Rock, N.C., a resort town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. His grandfathers were both Southern Baptist ministers — one “would literally ride a mule into those hollers, as they called the valleys, and preach to people who were too far removed from civilization to have a church,” he told The Seattle Times in 2014. His mother was a nurse; his father worked as a power company executive, and the family moved a number of times.
“The family in which I was reared was a kind of a Southern Baptist version of The Simpsons,” he told BookPage magazine in 2000, “and I played the part of both Bart and Lisa. Which is to say, I was, on the one hand, a rambunctious little troublemaker, and on the other, a highly sensitive, creative, artistic type.” He fell in love with reading early; by age 5, he was dictating stories to his mother.
Robbins was pulled out of public school on the grounds of “general naughtiness,” according to Rolling Stone, and sent first to a military academy and then to Washington and Lee University, where he was kicked out for throwing biscuits at his fraternity housemother. He migrated to Richmond, Va., where he went to work as a sports writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch, and finished his college degree there. He also married for the first time. Sent to Korea by the Air Force, he worked as a meteorologist and became a lifelong devotee of Asian culture.
In 1962, Robbins was accepted into the University of Washington’s Far East Institute, and within days of arriving in Seattle got a job at The Seattle Times. He left graduate school and evolved into an art critic, and his freewheeling style earned him the label “the Hells Angel of Art Criticism,” in the words of one Seattle Art Museum associate director.
In 1963, he dropped LSD for the first time, an event he says changed his writing and his life. He left The Times (he called it “calling in well” in his memoir) and moved briefly to New York City, then back to Seattle, where he hosted a radio show on KRAB-FM called “Notes from the Underground” and wrote art criticism for several local and national publications.
In 1966, his big break arrived in the person of an editor at the publishing house Doubleday, who contacted him about doing a book of art criticism. Robbins pitched another book — a novel about the kidnapping of the mummified body of Jesus Christ. No, he hadn’t written it yet, but the editor was interested, so he set to work. He moved with a girlfriend to South Bend in Pacific County and began to write “Another Roadside Attraction,” incorporating the kidnapping with the story of two free spirits who operate a combination hot dog stand and roadside zoo in Skagit County. He paid the bills by commuting to Seattle on the weekends to work on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer copy desk, and eating discarded oysters, shrimp and lobster that his waitress girlfriend brought home from the job.
He finished the book in 1970, and moved to La Conner, a place he chose because of its remoteness and its tolerance for artistic types. In 1971, at age 39, he saw the publication of his first novel. Despite praise from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Graham Greene, “Another Roadside Attraction” sold poorly at first. But word of mouth spread throughout the counterculture and it became a phenomenon, as its paperback version, dubbed the “quintessential Sixties novel” by Rolling Stone, was snapped up by young counterculture readers. Robbins said the novel caught on because of its ability to view the psychedelic revolution “from the inside out,” that its structure “radiates in many directions at once,” according to a 1982 interview in the book, “Conversations with Tom Robbins.”
He followed it up with 1976’s “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” the story of Sissy Hankshaw, a bisexual heroine with an adventurer’s heart and outrageously large thumbs, a novel that led Rolling Stone to crown him “the new king of the extended metaphor, dependent clause, outrageous pun, and meteorological personification.” By 1978, his first two novels had sold 2 million copies, and “Cowgirls” was eventually made into a 1993 film by Portland director Gus Van Sant. His next book, 1980’s “Still Life with Woodpecker,” reached No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list. He would eventually publish 12 books, including a children’s book (“B is for Beer”) and his bestselling 2014 memoir “Tibetan Peach Pie.”
Success enabled Robbins to add on to his modest La Conner home (now called Villa de Jungle Girl), travel widely and have fun, visiting far-flung places from Namibia to Sumatra. He toured Mexico and Central America with mythologist Joseph Campbell. He had small movie parts in several Alan Rudolph films.
Married several times, and the father of three sons by different marriages, he eventually found love with Alexa d’Avalon, a yoga instructor, psychic and tarot reader whom he met in the late 1980s and married in 1994.
His son Rip Robbins, who is from Delaware, said his relationship with his father began late in his teenage years. When he was 17, his father took him and a friend to a psychedelic party, where movies and music were playing in a “real eye-opening experience,” he said Sunday.
“He would tell me that I was more like a younger brother than a son,” said Rip Robbins, who is now 70. “ … We kind of had a little bit of a different relationship in terms of just getting to know each other as adults.”
Rip Robbins said he credits his father with helping him finish college and introduce him to literature he had never heard of in high school. Having Tom Robbins as a father was “intimidating,” Rip Robbins said, in large part because his father had a voracious appetite for reading.
Tom Robbins turned his house into an art gallery, with a subspecialty in lurid traveling carnival banners featuring freaks, beautiful women and alligators. Carnivals were an obsession from his youth in Blowing Rock when traveling circuses would cycle through and transform the staid town. His study was more subdued, with an old wooden desk and a sofa stacked with inscribed yellow legal pads — Robbins wrote out his books longhand (one draft, he claimed) before turning them over to an assistant.
Though he made occasional public appearances (he was a perennial judge for Skagit County’s White Trash Food Festival), he never lost his shyness; in interviews he was quiet and introspective, and La Conner residents collaborated in helping him maintain his privacy.
Despite his privacy, Robbins was generous with his time when it came to both friends and fans. In a statement on social media, his wife said Robbins received “daily love letters” and he tried to answer every one.
Seattle writer and radio host Katy Sewall said she first met Robbins as an intern at KUOW in 2004 when she was sent to his home to record him while he was being interviewed. The two sat and chatted afterward and discovered they both had a mutual love of old-time radio.
The exact date of this meeting is immortalized on Sewall’s skateboard, which Robbins signed upon her request, the message reading “For Katie, don’t try to stop her.”
Sewall and Robbins continued as pen pals over the decades since. Robbins often included flourishes like “spectacular” stamps or a packet of fairy dust, she said.
In 1997 he won Bumbershoot’s Golden Umbrella Award, which recognizes “one artist from the Northwest whose body of work represents major achievement in his or her discipline.” He was a “member at large” of Seattle 7 Writers, a nonprofit service organization of prominent local authors who got together to support writing and raise money for literary organizations and causes.
Though he was named a lifetime laureate of Seattle’s Rainier Club in 2006, he held fast to his lively, counterclockwise point of view, lobbing eloquent, articulate grenades at targets such as the destructive arc of capitalism and the malign intentions of the American government. He once described his books as “cakes with files baked in them. … I try to create something that’s beautiful to look at and delicious to the taste, and yet in the middle there’s this hard, sharp instrument that you can use to saw through the bars and liberate yourself, should you so desire.”
In a statement on Facebook, his wife Alexa wrote that he died surrounded by family and pets, and that Robbins asked that people remember him by reading his books.
“Tom was the best friend and partner I could have asked for,” she wrote. “We shared 36 beautiful and adventurous years together. If there’s such a thing as a soul mate, he was mine.”
He was still working on writing projects well into his 80s.
And for his legions of fans, Robbins kept the flame of creativity and hope alive. In 2017, he had this exchange with state poet laureate Tod Marshall in City Arts magazine, as the two writers discussed our tumultuous times:
Robbins: “We’ve had dark ages in the past.”
Marshall: “Does it feel like a dark age to you?”
Robbins: “It’s starting to feel that way more and more, but my porchlight is burning night and day.”
Donations in his honor may be made to Hospice of the Northwest, the Museum of Northwest Art, the La Conner Swinomish Library and SPOT Animal Rescue.
Seattle Times staff reporter Amanda Zhou contributed to this report.