Counterculture of the 1970s is a cosmic comic novel about a giant summed hitchhiker, a stone secret agent, and a mysterious stockbroker who caught millions of readers in counterculture of the 1970s. Tom Robbins passed away Sunday at his home in LaConnor, Washington.
His son Fleetwood confirmed his death, but did not cite the cause.
Along with the works of Carlos Castaneda, Richard Blautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins' paperback was a torn dog ears with a torn. Ronald Reagan's America. He has become one of the rare authors who achieve both cult following and mega bestseller status.
With their winding plots, pop philosophical aids, and frequent jabs in social practices and organized religion, Robbins' book is about acid trips, acid trips in gratitude yoga retreats, and grateful dead It was the perfect accompaniment for the show and weekend yoga retreat.
He continued to write in the 21st century, but “Even cowgirls get blues” (1976), “Half Sleep in Frog's Pajamas” (1994), “Bringing Home from a Vicious Invalidated House “We have constantly selected titles that cited the whims of the dayglos of the era. Hot climate” (2000).
His storyline was secondary and difficult to explain. I read Tom Robbins' novels for the courage of well-memorized writing, not for the tense stories. His literary currency is exaggerated, ironic, batos, cartoon mythical, and was combined to truly achieve his own effect.
Such a representative line is from “Even Cowgers Get the Blues” and his second novel: “In the afternoon, I was squeezed out of Mickey's mouse nose.”
Strange, nostalgic, vaguely unsettling – anything that calls it, fans couldn't get enough.
His first book, Another Roadside Attraction (1971), received critical acclaim (Rolling Stone calls it “a classic novel of the 1960s”), and the first flop of Hardback After that, the novel began with paperback. By the time “Even Cowgirls Get Blues” appeared, five years later, “Another Roadside Attraction” sold over 100,000 copies.
Robbins maintained an arm lengthy army of fans. Very private, he rarely sat or photographed for interviews. He occasionally left his home in the tugboat town of LaConnor, north of Seattle.
He wrote slowly – pens, long hands, notepads – suffered with each sentence, sometimes spending an hour on one line. He rarely pre-sets his story, and prefers that his instincts and imagination advance him above the pathway of well-converted words.
“I don't know how to write a novel,” he told Seattle Weekly in 2006. “It didn't show me how to write a novel. It's a new adventure every time I start, and I like it. When I start a book, I rarely even have a vague sense of intrigue.”
Robbins claimed to draw inspiration from Asian philosophy and Greek mythology. As a paradigm for thinking not through source material but through ways of expressing his views on reality.
“The reviewer also describes my work as “comic style.” This makes me look like a comp. I love comics, and cartoons are very Greek,” he told Seattle Weekly. “The creator of Greek mythology worked like a cartoonist, drawing with great bold strokes without many physical or psychological details.”
He was often identified as a Seattle writer, but he was born and raised in the South, and even 50 years after moving to the Pacific Northwest, a bit of a twang remained.
“I derive from a long line of preachers and police officers,” he told High Times in 2000. Otherwise, reasonable people who say they are facts. So I think it naturally comes to the narrative trend. ”
His former fanbase was drawn from his 20s and his aftermath of his hippie days. The base remained the same age while he continued writing.
As with Mr. Vonnegut or Hermann Hesse, one of Mr. Robbins' Idols, his caring sensibility and hyperpemasy style have been delved deep into the minds of young readers, but their charms are what they are. often shrinks, along with the appeal of jam bands and psychoactive drugs. Fans moved towards middle-aged people.
His book continued to make his debut on the New York Times bestseller list, but critics have made him more and more lightly a relic of the 1960s. He expressed even more dissatisfaction with critics who claimed to choose between humor and gravity, as if the two were mutually exclusive.
And in fact, his work, especially his early books, was more than just nostalgic fluff. Their ridiculous writing and hairy dog plot have obscured serious literary inventions decades away by taking on topics about ecology, feminism and religion.
“It's stupidity that most critics of my work are goofy,” he told The New York Times in 1993. My response is that when God does, I supplement my heart. Because life is sacred, a mixture of pro-blood, good and evil. It is a mistake to try to separate them. ”
Thomas Eugene Robbins was born on July 22, 1932 in Rock, North Carolina, a small town northeast of Asheville, and later moved with his family to the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. His father, George, worked for an electric company. His mother, Katherine (Robinson) Robbins, was a nurse. Both his grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers.
He later said, he was the perfect beginning to a long literary career that he traced to his earliest imaginative graffiti at the age of five.
As a teenager, he told his parents he wanted to be a novelist. His father wanted to direct his son into a more practical career and convinced him to enroll in Washington and Lee University, a Virginia school known for his journalism program. As a sports reporter for the Campus Newspaper, he was edited by Tom Wolf.
Robbins left after sophomore and was convinced that more time in the classroom would do nothing for his writing career. He joined the Air Force, which sent him to Korea as a meteorologist. He later said that most of his time was spent fencing toiletries at the Black Market.
After being discharged from the hospital in 1957, he returned to Richmond, where he enrolled at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Commonwealth University, Virginia), where he gained a local reputation as a coffee shop poet.
He also worked as a copy editor for his work, Richmond Times Dispatch, after graduating with a degree in journalism in 1959.
But he rubbed under Jim Crow Ehra Richmond restrictions, including a newspaper ban on printing photos of black people.
Eventually, it all turned out to be too much, and he moved to what appears to be the farthest point from Richmond, the lower 48 states: Seattle.
He participated in a graduate program in Far East Studies at the University of Washington, first as an editor and then as an art critic for the Seattle Times. He also hosted a bohemian-inspired radio show called “Notes from the Underground.”
In 1963 he took 300 micrograms of pharmaceutical grade lyserformate diethylamide. This was his first LSD trip. It is life-changing and life-affirming, it said. He quit his job to write freelance for an underground newspaper.
He built a local reputation as a quirky writer, but until 1967, when he reviewed Doors' concerts, he was inspired by the liberating otherworldly nature of Jim Morrison and his band. I found the style. He moved to LaConnor and began writing novels.
After releasing “Another Roadside Attraction” in 1971, he settled at the pace of about one book every five years, including eight novels, story collections, novels and more recently the memoir “Tibetan Peach Pie: Imagination A rich life” (2014).
Most of his novels were chosen by Hollywood, despite the belief that Mr. Robbins could barely filter them. He proved right in 1993 when director Gus Van San released his version of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Carin James of the Times dismissed it, among other things, as “tortured” and “worked.”
Robbins' first three marriages ended with divorce. He married psychic Alexa da Avalon in 1994. With his son, from his previous marriage, she survives him. And grandchildren.
One of the keys to his lasting success with fans was the same thing that irritated many of his critics. Even if he (and they) had aging, he retained the same philosophical mistakes that defined his earliest sentences.
“I admire it very much. It just depends on what I see,” he told The Times in 2014.
