Tom Robbins (Tom Thomas Eugene Robbins) Biography

American novelist, born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, educated at Lee University and the University of Washington. He first published the biography Guy Anderson (1965), and remained relatively unknown until his two novels Another Roadside Attraction (1971) and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) were republished in paperback. His hugely popular novels embrace the counter-cultural attitudes of personal freedom, transcendence through Eastern mysticism, and escape from the urban to the pastoral Pacific Northwest common to the ‘West Coast’ school of writing and authors like Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan. Another Roadside Attraction is about some eccentrics who get involved with the mummified body of Christ which appears at the Captain Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Reserve; whilst Even Cowgirls Get the Blues narrates the adventures of Sissy Hankshaw, an extraordinary hitchhiker endowed with oversize thumbs. Less well received was Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), but success returned with Jitterbug Perfume (1984), about a waitress called Priscilla who devotes her life to inventing the ultimate perfume. Robbins has maintained his reputation for anarchical attitudes to traditional narrative forms, and his love of word-play, puns, and black humour, in Skinny Legs and All (1990). His novel Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas appeared in 1994.