Tom Robbins, ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ author, dead at 92

Novelist Tom Robbins, whose counterculture works included “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Jitterbug Perfume,” died Sunday. He was 92.

Robbins’ death was announced by his wife, Alexa Robbins, on Facebook. The post did not cite a cause. His son Fleetwood also confirmed the death but did not cite a cause, The New York Times reported. The author died at his home in La Conner, Washington.

“I’m grateful Tom lived as long as he did. He had an eternally youthful spirit,” Alexa Robbins wrote. “People thought he was my elder. He really was the kid.”

Robbins played to the hippie culture of the 1970s with books and characters that portrayed “serious playfulness” in the most outlandish ways possible, Reuters reported.

“Minds were made for blowing,” Robbins wrote in “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas.”

His first book, “Another Roadside Attraction” (1971), received critical praise, according to the Times. After it flopped as a hardback work, it gained popularity as a paperback.

Although he was identified as a writer from the Pacific Northwest, Robbins was born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and grew up in Virginia, The Associated Press reported.

A native of Blowing Rock, North Carolina who moved to Virginia and was named “Most Mischievous Boy” by his high school, Robbins could match any narrative in his books with one about his life. There was the time he had to see a proctologist and showed up wearing a duck mask. (The doctor and Robbins became friends). He liked to recall the food server in Texas who unbuttoned her top and revealed a faded autograph, his autograph.

“I’m descended from a long line of preachers and policemen,” Robbins told High Times magazine in 2002. “Now, it’s common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way as to convince otherwise rational people that they’re factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally.”

Robbins’ characters were over the top. They included Sissy Hankshaw, the hitchhiker with 9-inch thumbs in “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues;” and Switters, the pacifist CIA operative in love with a nun in “Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates.” “Skinny Legs and All” featured a talking can of pork and beans, a dirty sock and the quirky performance artist Turn Around Norman, Reuters reported.

Robbins wrote eight novels, a novella and a story collection, the Times reported. His memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life,” was published in 2014.

“Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” published in 1976, was adapted into a film in 1993 and starred Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco and Pat Morita.

Other works included “Fierce Invalids Home from Home Climates” and “Villa Incognito,” the AP reported.

Robbins won the Bumbershoot Golden Umbrella Award for Lifetime Achievement and was named one of the 100 best authors of the 20th century by Writers’s Digest.

“Your books make me laugh, they make think, they make me horny,” a fan once wrote to him, according to the AP. “And they make me aware of all the wonder in the world.”

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