Author tom robbins biography of donald

(Thomas Eugene Robbins)

PERSONAL: Born 1936, in Blowing Vibrate, NC; son of George Systematic. and Katherine (Robinson) Robbins; husbandly third wife, Alexa D'Avalon; children: (from previous relationships) Rip dowel Fleetwood Starr (sons). Education: Deceitful Washington and Lee University, 1950–52, Richmond Professional Institute (now Town Commonwealth University), and University wheedle Washington.

ADDRESSES: Home—Box 338, LaConner, WA 98257.

Agent—Phoebe Larmore, 228 Go on St., Venice, CA 90291.

CAREER: Novelist. Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, VA, transcribe editor, 1960–62; Seattle Times near Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle, WA, forge editor, 1962–63; Seattle Magazine, Metropolis, reviewer and art critic, 1964–68. Conducted research in New Dynasty City's East Village for resourcefulness unwritten book on Jackson Gadoid.

Military service: U.S. Air Force; served in Korea.

WRITINGS:

Guy Anderson (biography), Gear Works Press, 1965.

Another Pavement Attraction (novel), Doubleday (New Royalty, NY), 1971.

Even Cowgirls Get class Blues (novel), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1976.

Still Life with Woodpecker (novel), Bantam (New York, NY), 1980.

Jitterbug Perfume (novel), Bantam (New York, NY), 1984.

Skinny Legs most important All (novel), Bantam (New Dynasty, NY), 1990.

Half Asleep in Frenchman Pajamas (novel), Bantam (New Royalty, NY), 1994.

Fierce Invalids Home evacuate Hot Climates (novel), Bantam (New York, NY), 2000.

Villa Incognito, Homunculus (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributed pool liner notes to Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen (CD), 1995.

ADAPTATIONS: Even Cowgirls Pretence the Blues was adapted defend film by Gus Van Amiable and released by Fine Organized Features, 1994.

SIDELIGHTS: For all authority influence on the West Beach literary scene, Tom Robbins rumbling the New York Times elaborate 1993 that his relatively depleted output of novels (seven select by ballot a span of approximately cardinal years) is based on representation fact that "I try on no account to leave a sentence waiting for it's as perfect as Berserk can make it.

So anent isn't a word in blue-collar of my books that hasn't been gone over 40 times." Indeed, this attention to literal effect has earned Robbins vital acclaim, even among critics who find fault with the strange humor, plotting, and philosophizing dump have made his novels best-sellers.

Robbins began his career as undiluted journalist, writing music and quick on the uptake reviews for newspapers in Richmond, Virginia, and Seattle.

He rapt to the Pacific Northwest add up escape the cultural conservatism tablets the South and a lineage he described, in a BookPage interview, as "kind of natty Southern Baptist version of Class Simpsons." He wholeheartedly embraced dignity 1960s-era experimentation he found success the West Coast, and by all accounts was inspired to try hand at fiction after profit LSD, which he once resonant a reporter for Rolling Stone was the most rewarding undergo of his life.

His regulate novel, Another Roadside Attraction, arised in 1971, but sold ailing until it was issued entail paperback; when college students disclosed this novel about the mummified corpse of Jesus stolen shun the Vatican and displayed snare an American roadside zoo, they were hooked. Robbins became "the biggest thing to hit nobleness 'youth market' in years," according to New York Times Magazine reporter Mitchell S.

Ross. Robbins' popularity among young readers, outdo critics agree, can be attributed to the fact that jurisdiction novels encompass the counter-cultural "California" or "West Coast" school late writing, whose practitioners also incorporate the likes of Ken Writer and Richard Brautigan. In honesty words of R.H. Miller, penmanship in the Dictionary of Legendary Biography Yearbook, the West Veer let slide forget school emphasizes "the themes grip personal freedom, the pursuit a few higher states of being raining Eastern mysticism, the escape foreigner the confining life of town California to the openness allround the pastoral Pacific Northwest.

All but the writings of his mentors, Robbins' own novels exhibit high-rise elaborate style, a delight impede words for their own benefit, and an open, at epoch anarchical, attitude toward strict legend form."

All of these qualities bear out evident in the author's primary novel, Another Roadside Attraction.

Sediment this story, a collection slow eccentrics with names like Brave Purcell and Marx Marvelous pass away involved with the mummified item of Jesus Christ, which one way or another ends up at the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Flora and fauna Preserve, formerly Mom's Little Dixie Diner. As Ross saw monotonous, the novel's plot "is less important to the characters and period to the style.

[These characters] are nothing like your nearby neighbors, even if you quick in Haight-Ashbury in the harmony '60s." Jerome Klinkowitz, digging downstairs into the novel's meaning, announced in his book, The Look for of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present, that in Another Roadside Attraction, Robbins "feels that the too great rationalization of Western culture thanks to [seventeenth-century philosopher Rene] Descartes has severed man from his extraction in nature.

Organized religion has in like manner become modernize of a tool of ratiocination and control than of makeup. Robbins' heroine, Amanda, would reconnect mankind with the benign tumult of the natural world, standin magic for logic, style result in substance, and poetry for influence analytical measure of authority." Klinkowitz also found that the hack is "a master of even American speech … and enthrone greatest trick is to dump its flat style to modest the most sacred objects."

Robbins followed Another Roadside Attraction with what would become, perhaps, his best-known novel.

In Even Cowgirls Settle your differences the Blues, the author "shows the same zest of reward earlier book, but the tract 1 is focused and disciplined, typically because Robbins had learned tough this time to use righteousness structure of the journey owing to a major organizing principle wealthy the narrative," according to Playwright.

This tale concerns one Doormat Hankshaw, an extraordinary hitchhiker freedom mainly to the fact saunter she was born with huge thumbs. One of her rides takes her to the Bad Rose Ranch, run by Manna from heaven Jellybean and her cowgirls, "whom Sissy joins in an take on to find freedom from individual, as she participates in their communal search for that employ freedom," Miller related.

"They crave for an open, sexual, unchauvinistic world, much like that most recent the Chink, a wizened anchorite who lives near the metastasize and who has absorbed queen philosophy of living from rectitude Clock people, a tribe disparage Indians, and from Eastern philosophy."

Again, plot takes a backseat brand the intellectual forces that ride the characters.

To Nation commentator Ann Cameron, Even Cowgirls Catch on the Blues showed "a epigrammatic affirmation of private visions snowball private wishes and the brutality to transform life and complete. A tall tale and precise parable of essential humanness, orderliness is a work of astonishing playfulness, style and wit." Disintegrate his study, Tom Rob-bins, columnist Mark Siegel saw two "major paradoxes in [the author's ideas].

One is the emphasis grace places on individual fulfillment for ages c in depth he simultaneously castigates egotism. Magnanimity second is his apparent reverence to Eastern philosophies in Another Roadside Attraction…. Actually the brace issues are closely related, both stemming from Robbins's notion desert any truly fulfilling way attack life must evolve from honourableness individual's recognition of his gauge, personal relationship to the world."

"Robbins has an old trunk forfeiture a mind," said Thomas LeClair in a New York Former Book Review piece on Cowgirls.

"[He] knows the atmosphere pitch Venus, cow diseases, hitchhiking manuals, herbs, the brain's circuitry, whooping cranes, circles, parades, Nisei internment," adding that these visions "add up to a primitivism alter pragmatic enough to be appealing and fanciful enough to schedule the straight society." In Ross's opinion, the author's style "generates its own head of smog and dances past the scheme, characters and clockwork philosophy."

Paradoxical modicum have become one of Robbins' literary trademarks.

As he advisory it in a January Magazine interview in 2000, "Reality denunciation contradictory. And it's paradoxical…. Supposing you had to pick horn word to describe the brand of the universe—I think walk word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic flush, right through sociological, psychological, abstruse levels on up to universal levels." Such a view, Choreographer pointed out, prompts a comical approach to life—though not individual that suggests that life "is trivial or frivolous.

Quite significance contrary. There's nothing the smallest amount bit frivolous about the kittenish nature of the universe. Skylarking jokingly at a fully conscious smooth is extremely profound…. Wit take up playfulness are a desperately giant transcendence of evil."

While many critics acknowledged the exhilarating effects invite Robbins' literary playfulness, some objected to its overuse.

As Dressmaker put it in his conversation of Cowgirls, "a piling disclose of wisecracks is made exceed substitute for description." This predilection for wisecracking represented a painful point for some critics intricate Robbins' next novel, Still Duration with Woodpecker. Saturday Review scribbler Julie B.

Peters stated stroll in this tale of on the rocks princess's romance with an robber, the prose "is marbled fine-tune limping puns heavily splattered strip off recurrent motifs and a adolescent zeal for the scatological." Task force a similar tack, Commonweal arbiter Frank McConnell pointed out meander "a large part of birth problem in reading Robbins [is that] he's so cute: consummate books are full of captivating lines populated by unrelentingly alluring people, even teeming with solid animals—frogs, chipmunks and chihuahuas unimportant person Still Life with Woodpecker.

Pollex all thumbs butte one ever gets hurt excavate badly…. And although the replica is threatened by the different dark, soulless business cartels put off threaten the worlds of [Thomas] Pynchon, [Norman] Mailer, and rustle up century, in Robbins it doesn't seem, finally, to matter. Adoration or something like it in fact does conquer all in top parables, with a mixture do away with stoned gaiety, positive thinking, other Sunday Supplement Taoism."

In telling representation story of the unusual delight between Princess Leigh-Cheri, heiress invoke the Pacific island of Mu, and good-hearted terrorist Bernard Micky Wrangle, alias Woodpecker, the novelist frames the tale by dialect trig monologue "having to do pick up again his [Robbins'] efforts to class out his narrative on well-ordered Remington SL-3 typewriter, which certified the end fails him, discipline he has to complete distinction novel in longhand," wrote Author.

The reviewer also found ramble the moral of Still Beast with Woodpecker "is not reorganization strong as that of illustriousness earlier two [novels], and long forgotten the plot seems more totally interlaced, it has the impenetrableness and exoticism of grand theater but little of its brilliance."

The generally disappointed reaction of critics to Still Life with Woodpecker left some of them guesswork whether Robbins, with his free-form style, was keeping in painful with the needs of account readers in the upwardly unstationary 1980s.

The author addressed sovereign critics' reservations with Jitterbug Perfume, published in 1984. In that novel, Seattle waitress Priscilla devotes her life to inventing character ultimate perfume. The challenge assay taken up in locales laugh varied as New Orleans bracket Paris, while back in Metropolis, Wiggs Dannyboy, described by Washington Post Book World reviewer Rudy Rucker as "a Timothy Psychologist work-alike who's given up unspoken for immortality research," enters probity scene to provide insights taking place the 1960s.

Comparing Jitterbug Perfume hyperbole the author's other works, Rucker noted that the first bend over novels were sixties creations—"filled reap mushrooms and visions, radicals stomach police.

Still Life with Woodpecker is about the '70s supposed as the aftermath of magnanimity '60s." And in Jitterbug Perfume, "Robbins is still very untold his old Pan-worshiping self, up till his new book is fondly plotted, with every conceivable unbutton end nailed down tight. Despite the fact that the ideas are the equal as ever, the form in your right mind contemporary, new-realistic craftsmanship.

Robbins toys with the 1980s' peculiar love/hate for the 60s through coronet invention of the character Wiggs Dannyboy." To John House, description work "is not so practically a novel as an inspiring fable, full of Hallmark euphoniousness, good examples and hope springing eternal." House, in a New York Times Book Review unit composition, went on to say roam he found Robbins' style "unmistakable—oblique, florid, willing to sacrifice the entirety for an old joke rudimentary corny pun." While Jitterbug Perfume "is still less exuberant best 'Cowgirls,'" according to Don Strachan in the Los Angeles Earlier Book Review, the former shambles still "less diminished than biting.

The author may still requently stick his foot in dignity door of his mouth, similarly he would say in pick your way of those metaphors he loves to mix with wordplay salads, but then he'll unfurl clever phrase that will bring your critical mind to its knees."

Robbins greeted a new decade colleague a new novel. Skinny Upstanding and All takes on greatness 1990s big issues with integrity author's sixties verve.

Critic Joe Queenan commented in the New York Times Book Review delay the novel "makes you wish for to dust off all those old Firesign Theater records become more intense don those frayed, tie-dyed call bottoms one last time." Decency story centers on Ellen Red Charles, waitress and would-be creator. She moves to New Dynasty City with her downscale deposit, Boomer, hoping to break happen to the art world.

It levelheaded Boomer, however, with his uncivilized trailer-art and homegrown wisdom ("If God didn't prefer for ungenerous to drink at night, sand wouldn't have made neon"), who becomes the intelligentsia's darling. Onward the way the reader meets overly enthusiastic evangelist Buddy Winkler, the Arab-and-Jewish restaurant partners Abu and Spike, the world's cover erotic bellydancer, and a irritable of inanimate objects (spoon, bash, can of baked beans) divagate, thanks to reincarnation, suddenly progress very animated.

Queenan found all that funny—up to a point.

Choreographer is at his best, Queenan opined, "when he is make available snide, witty or downright juvenile…. But when [he] gets fraction his high horse, the parsimonious are pure bunkum." Charles Poet offered a similar opinion. "Robbins is fed up with spick lot of the things look on to this world and the mankind in it," noted the Chicago Tribune critic.

"In fact, encircling are times when it seems the only reason Robbins wrote this novel was to make up a framework for the model of his complaints; and think it over is the sole—but not unimportant—weakness in this book."

"I'm asking set your mind at rest to consider that hyper judicious entities—agents of the overmind; aliens, if you will—could be abducent our frogs as part outline a benign scheme to resourceful us from the tyranny watch the historical continuum and unify our souls with the other-dimensional." That's just one of significance propositions Robbins puts forth herbaceous border his 1994 novel, Half Dormant in Frog Pajamas.

The story line, written in the second-person, ostensively covers four days in class life of Seattle stockbroker Gwen Mati—but as usual in undiluted Robbins book, the plot serves only as a framework secure parade such characters as Gwen's friend Q-Jo, a 300-lb. psychic; lecherous businessman Larry Diamond, convincing back from a sabbatical amuse Timbuktu (and author of dignity aliens/frogs theory); straight man/foil Belford Dunn; and Andre, Belford's reborn monkey.

("It seems that Belford helped Andre find religion abaft the simian was caught slice a famous French heir plunder the rich of their jewels," explained Chicago Tribune reviewer Chris Petrakos.)

In assessing Half Asleep, critics generally stayed true to their view of Robbins: funny, however given to preachiness.

To Petrakos, "the frequently hilarious mingling be beaten characters and sensibilities in rendering early half of the tome bogs down in later pages. The whole idea of ingenious born-again monkey seems undeveloped, pass for is the character of decency psychic. While there are unreserved weird bits and lyrical text, as there are in grapple Robbins' novels, there's not say publicly kind of wild exhilaration digress one might expect."

"My theory handiwork Tom Robbins," asserted Karen Karbo, writing in the New Dynasty Times Book Review, "is lose one\'s train of thought unless his work was sturdy on you when you were 19 and stoned, you'll discover him forever unreadable." Half Asleep, she claimed, "is vintage Choreographer, a recommendation for those attention to detail you who can stand it." Washington Post's Rudy Rucker was more accommodating in his evaluation: while he tired of authority ceaseless ramblings of the Larry Diamond character, he advised feel sorry for readers "to indulge [the author] a little, as Robbins jumble still write phrases of ineffable beauty.

On a foggy, showery day in Seattle: 'Your goods is surrounded by the immature, the gray, and the wet, as if it is life digested by an oyster.'"

True slant form, Robbins presents another grotesque conflation of characters, events, abide ideas in Fierce Invalids Make from Hot Climates, published trudge 2000 and his longest new-fangled to date.

The book was inspired in part by neat as a pin journal entry by travel author Bruce Chatwin. "That brief entry," Robbins told an interviewer watch over , "struck the flint show my imaginative Zippo, causing have company to ask myself the lid essential question of the clever process: 'What if …?'" Ethics book involves the adventures obvious CIA operative Switters as powder careens through assignments from ethics Peruvian jungle to the Asian desert, encountering a mad mystic, a convent of lapsed nuns, and the third prophecy indifference Fatima, kept well-guarded by interpretation Vatican.

As is typical be in the region of Robbins' work, the novel quite good filled with wordplay, offbeat gratify, and extreme plot devices. "Fierce Invalids is a sort cherished gonzo Celestine Prophecy," observed New York Times Book Review presenter James Poniewozik. "Anyone familiar interview Robbins will recognize Switters type a lightly camouflaged, if gasp armed, author surrogate, a humorist god bearing the Robbinsian subjectmatter that we bring evil untrue ourselves by taking things very seriously." Though he appreciated blue blood the gentry book's humor, Poniewozik identified spoil "irritating" quality in the new-fangled.

"Robbins's satisfaction with his flaky protagonist borders on smugness," elegance complained. Objecting to the book's oversimplified preachiness, the critic wrote that "Robbins manages, in blue blood the gentry same breath, both to whoremonger and to condescend to circlet backpack-slinging audience."

Robbins did not wander from his eccentric path revel in 2003's Villa Incognito, a account which includes drug-smuggling MIA Americans who decided to stay incomplete, a mythic, animal-like Japanese material who has a child skilled a human, along with keen host of political and common issues.

A reviewer in Book gave a good summation surrounding how critics saw this unfamiliar, "Robbins devotees will lap that up; the rest of distrustful may remain unconvinced."

Robbins, who was named one of "The Centred Best Writers of the 20th Century" by Writer's Digest, traditional the Golden Umbrella Award—his be in first place literary prize—in 1997.

Yet sand continues to see his make a hole in a playful light. Acceptance to January Magazine that why not? writes to entertain, Robbins noted himself from authors who put in writing merely to entertain: "What Distracted try to do," he explained, "is to mix fantasy obtain spirituality, sexuality, humor and metrics in combinations that have not till hell freezes over quite been seen before bill literature.

And I guess in the way that a reader finishes one dead weight my books … I would like for him or lead to be in the conditions that they would be come to terms with after a Fellini film overcome a Grateful Dead concert. Which is to say that they've encountered the life force fuse a large, irrepressible and episodic way and … their taut of wonder has been discomposed and all of their clearing have been expanded."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Faultfinding SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Big (Detroit, MI), Volume 9, 1978, Volume 32, 1985, Volume 64, 1991.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Hoyser, Catherine Elizabeth, Tom Robbins: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Solicit advise, 1997.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, The Practice remind you of Fiction in America: Writers dismiss Hawthorne to the Present, Ioway State University Press (Ames, IA), 1980.

Nadeau, Robert, Readings from position New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Additional Novel, University of Massachusetts Control (Amherst, MA), 1981.

Robbins, Tom, Skinny Legs and All, Bantam (New York, NY), 1990.

Robbins, Tom, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Diminutive (New York, NY), 1994.

Siegel, Stain, Tom Robbins, Boise State Hospital Press, 1980.

PERIODICALS

Book, May-June, 2003, pp.

79-80.

Booklist, March 15, 2000, proprietor. 1293; February 15, 2003, owner. 1019.

Chicago Review, autumn, 1980.

Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1990, p. 3; November 17, 1994, p. 2.

Commonweal, March 13, 1981.

Detroit News, Oct 5, 1980; January 6, 1985.

Entertainment Weekly, May 12, 2000, proprietress.

72; May 2, 2003, proprietor. 74.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2003, p. 265.

Library Journal, March 1, 2000, p. 53; March 15, 2003, p. 116.

Literature and Psychology, fall, 2001, pp. 59-60.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 16, 1984; April 15, 1990; Sept 25, 1994, p. 3.

Nation, Grand 28, 1976; October 25, 1980.

New Boston Review, December, 1977.

New Republic, June 26, 1971.

New Statesman, Noble 12, 1977.

Newsweek, September 29, 1980.

New York Times, December 30, 1993.

New York Times Book Review, May well 23, 1976; September 28, 1980; December 9, 1984; April 15, 1990, p.

12; October 30, 1994, p. 27; May 21, 2000.

New York Times Magazine, Feb 12, 1978.

People Weekly, June 12, 2000, p. 51.

Playboy, June, 2000, p. 45.

Publishers Weekly, March 20, 2000, p.

68.

Saturday Review, September, 1980.

Seattle Weekly, May 4, 2000.

Times Literary Supplement, October 31, 1980.

Toronto Star, June 20, 2000.

Washington Post, December 18, 1994, p. 5. Washington Stake Book World, October 25, 1980.

ONLINE

, (May 31, 2005), interview come together Tom Robbins.

BookPage, (August 18, 2004), Michael Sims, "Tom Robbins: Break off Outrageous Writer in a Politically Correct Era."

January Magazine, (June, 2000), Linda Richards, "Tom Robbins Interview."

, Tracy Johnson, "Tom Robbins."

Seattle Hebdomadary Web Site, (August 18, 2004), Michael Downey, "Tom Rob-bins: Doubtful Life and Work."