Tom Robbins, an author of counter-culture of the 1970s, 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 the magazine Digest of the writer in 2000, died. He was 92 years old.
His son Fleetwood confirmed his death on Sunday at the New York Times. No cause has been cited.
Born Thomas Eugene Robbins, the American iconoclastic author was known for his silly and irreverent novels of the 1970s and 80s. In them, the characters broke out with his play of words and his fervent philosophical opinions. The successful author of more than 11 books, including classics like “Another Roadside Attraction”, “Same Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Jitterbug Perfume”, transformed the optimistic hippie sensitivity of the 1960s into bizarre and fun stories.
His first novel, “Another roadside attraction”, was published in 1971 when Robbins was 39 years old – more than three decades after having declared to his parents, at the age of 5, that he would be a writer. The novel has become a classic underground.
His later novel in 1976, “even the cowgirls Get the Blues”, highlighted the dynamic Sissy Hankshaw, a woman with oversized thumbs that capitalizes on her mutation by becoming a hitchhiker. The American novelist Thomas Pynchon called him “a piece of work magic, warm, funny and healthy”.
The story was adapted in a 1993 film directed by Gus Van Sant, with Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves, and was told by Robbins. He received bad journals and was a commercial failure.
Although it is quoted as once saying that he never wrote memory, his “Tibetan peaches pie: a real story of an imaginative life, published in 2014”, sewn stories from his extraordinary life. Since his childhood in the mountains of the Appalachians during the great depression in the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s on the West Coast, the memory, he told the New York Times Magazine in 2014, “was precipitated by the desire to please women”.
“His stories were just as little magical as his writing, where you simply cannot say the limits of reality and fantasy,” said George Mason, co-founder of Authors Road. Mason and Salli Slaughter, his wife, interviewed Robbins in his house in 2011 and were charmed as much by his playfulness as they were impressed by stories from his past.
“It's just an incredibly loving soul,” said actor Debra Winger, a pen friend and a close friend of Robbins. “There is nothing better than having Tom as a friend because he is still rooted for you.”
The two met in the late 1970s and quickly became friends. “He was sort of out of his books,” said Winger, who was continuously impressed by his “incredible positivity”.
“I have never seen Tommy dark or desperate … He could just see the light side of anything. He could write on the other but he could always see the light side.… He is just a sunny and sunny guy, and I think he lived his life exactly as he wanted. ”
And each time he could, he manifested the same light and the same stupidity of his novels in reality.
Robbins was special about the way and where his publishers read the manuscripts of his book. His favorite editorial conference place was two Bunch Palms, a complex and a spa near Desert Hot Springs. Until its publishers feel in the swimming pool and massages have refused to show them their work.
“They were not allowed to read them elsewhere,” recalls Winger. And its publishers, although at the start of the same, would comply. “These are the types of requests he made for you who were also good for you.”
Nicknamed Tommy Rotten in his childhood, Robbins was born on July 22, 1932 in Blowing Rock, in North Carolina, George Thomas Robbins, director of the company, and Katherine Robinson, nurse. His two grandparents were Baptist preachers. At 10, his family moved to eastern Virginia. He was the four -year -old, including twins Mary and Mariane, and Rena, who died after receiving an ether overdose at the hospital before Robbins was 7 years old.
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 second year, he abandoned to meet and embarked on a trip “Pre-Beatnik Hitchhiking” and worked for construction jobs.
A few 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 released, he returned to the United States in 1957 and enrolled in the Richmond Professional Institute – which later became Virginia Commonwealth University. There he was a columnist and editor -in -chief of his university newspaper. He then joined the staff of the Richmond Times-Dispatch as a copy publisher.
But Robbins did not borrow with the conservative slope of the newspaper. Finally, after a few mounting tensions with its editor, he left for Washington. He settled there for the rest of his life.
“Seattle was the most distant place in Richmond on the map without leaving the country,” he said at Rolling Stone once. “And I couldn't afford to leave the country.” But his attraction for the Western country also stems from his artistic studies. He was particularly intrigued by the school of mystical painters inspired by the landscapes of the west coast.
At the beginning of 1962, Robbins had moved to Seattle. He took a job by working for the Seattle Times as a editor -in -chief of assistant, finally becoming art critic and art columnist for Seattle magazine.
The following summer Robbins knew “the most enriching day of my life”. On July 16, 1963, he took the LSD. His meeting with the psychedelics, he said, pushed him to leave his concert at Seattle Times.
“I called one day,” he wrote in his memories. “What do you mean, well?” His publisher responded. “Well, I’ve been sick since I’ve been working there, and now I’m doing well, and I’ll not come.”
And he got up and left for New York looking for other people who had taken the drug. He became friends with the psychedelic defender Timothy Leary, but it was not long before he gets tired of the lively city and returned to Seattle, making a brief passage as a weekly radio.
The writing of Robbins earned him the Lifetime Achievement Award 1997 at the Festival des Arts de la Bumbershoot in Seattle and the Prix for the Lifetime Achievement 2012 of the Virginie Library. But his objectives as a writer were never to obtain distinctions or high level prices.
Instead, his goal was to “spin ideas and images in great subversive Bretzels of life, death and shower on the luck they can help keep the world living and give it flexibility to endure,” he said one day.
His words and imaginations were his incantations for the world and for himself.
“I always wanted to lead a life of enchantment,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone, “and writing is one of them. Magic is practical and pragmatic – this establishes links between objects or events in the most unusual way. When you do, the universe becomes a very exciting way.
A notoriously private and mysterious man, Robbins spent his life with enchanting readers with an intelligent play on words and bizarre and very fanciful stories that were sweating philosophical reflections and jokes.
But his greatest gift in life, he wrote in his memoirs, was not his writing. It was his ability to live in two distinct worlds simultaneously: in the planets of imagination and reality.
Robbins is survived by Alexa, his third wife over 30 years old and three sons of her previous marriages.
Pineda is a former Times staff editor.
