Beloved (and bestselling) novelist Tom Robbins—arguably most famous for his 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, adapted into a film by Gus Van Sant, and 1980’s Still Life with Woodpecker—died on Sunday at the age of 92. Robbins was celebrated for his serio-comic storytelling, his ecstatic, exuberant sentence craft, and his (somewhat begrudging) status as counter-culture icon. Born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, he is nevertheless widely identified with his adopted home state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest that he loved and chronicled.
Fun fact: Robbins was awarded “Most Mischievous Boy” by his high school class. (Fans of his work should be unsurprised by this.) “What I do,” Robbins has explained, “is twine ideas and images into big subversive pretzels of life, death, and goofiness on the chance that they might keep the world lively and give it the flexibility to endure.” There are none like him; he will be missed.
Read Tom Robbins on personalizing the editorial process and how to end a novel here.
