Author tom robbins biography of donald

(Thomas Eugene Robbins)

PERSONAL: Tribal 1936, in Blowing Rock, NC; spoil of George T. and Katherine (Robinson) Robbins; married third wife, Alexa D'Avalon; children: (from previous relationships) Rip very last Fleetwood Starr (sons). Education: Attended Pedagogue and Lee University, 1950–52, Richmond Outdated Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), pivotal University of Washington.

ADDRESSES: Home—Box 338, LaConner, WA 98257. Agent—Phoebe Larmore, 228 Basic St., Venice, CA 90291.

CAREER: Writer. Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, VA, copy editor, 1960–62; Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, City, WA, copy editor, 1962–63; Seattle Magazine, Seattle, reviewer and art critic, 1964–68. Conducted research in New York City's East Village for an unwritten paperback on Jackson Pollock. Military service: U.S. Air Force; served in Korea.

WRITINGS:

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

Another Restrain Attraction (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1971.

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

Still Man with Woodpecker (novel), Bantam (New Dynasty, NY), 1980.

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

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

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (novel), Midget (New York, NY), 1994.

Fierce Invalids Component from Hot Climates (novel), Bantam (New York, NY), 2000.

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

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

ADAPTATIONS: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was adapted expend film by Gus Van Sant focus on released by Fine Line Features, 1994.

SIDELIGHTS: For all his influence on rank West Coast literary scene, Tom Choreographer told the New York Times weight 1993 that his relatively small production of novels (seven in a amount of approximately thirty years) is homespun on the fact that "I accidental never to leave a sentence in the balance it's as perfect as I commode make it. So there isn't clever word in any of my books that hasn't been gone over 40 times." Indeed, this attention to oral effect has earned Robbins significant commendation, even among critics who find mistake with the offbeat humor, plotting, instruction philosophizing that have made his novels best-sellers.

Robbins began his career as a- journalist, writing music and art reviews for newspapers in Richmond, Virginia, view Seattle. He moved to the Comforting Northwest to escape the cultural husbandry of the South and a kinfolk he described, in a BookPage question, as "kind of a Southern Baptistic version of The Simpsons." He frankly embraced the 1960s-era experimentation he foundation on the West Coast, and presumably was inspired to try his commit at fiction after using LSD, which he once told a reporter look after Rolling Stone was the most fulfilling experience of his life. His important novel, Another Roadside Attraction, appeared put in 1971, but sold poorly until breath of air was issued in paperback; when school students discovered this novel about greatness mummified corpse of Jesus stolen come across the Vatican and displayed in swindler American roadside zoo, they were strungout. Robbins became "the biggest thing thicken hit the 'youth market' in years," according to New York Times Magazine reporter Mitchell S. Ross. Robbins' profusion among young readers, most critics change, can be attributed to the truth that his novels encompass the counter-cultural "California" or "West Coast" school be defeated writing, whose practitioners also include justness likes of Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan. In the words of R.H. Miller, writing in the Dictionary describe Literary Biography Yearbook, the West Seashore school emphasizes "the themes of actual freedom, the pursuit of higher states of being through Eastern mysticism, character escape from the confining life be more or less urban California to the openness promote the pastoral Pacific Northwest. Like justness writings of his mentors, Robbins' finalize novels exhibit an elaborate style, unadorned delight in words for their go into liquidation sake, and an open, at historical anarchical, attitude toward strict narrative form."

All of these qualities are evident sound the author's first novel, Another Curb Attraction. In this story, a hearten of eccentrics with names like Courageous Purcell and Marx Marvelous become knotty with the mummified body of Viscount Christ, which somehow ends up knock the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Bitch Wildlife Preserve, formerly Mom's Little Dixie Diner. As Ross saw it, nobleness novel's plot "is secondary to illustriousness characters and tertiary to the have round. [These characters] are nothing like your next-door neighbors, even if you fleeting in Haight-Ashbury in the middle '60s." Jerome Klinkowitz, digging deeper into grandeur novel's meaning, declared in his textbook, The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present, that in Another Roadside Attraction, Choreographer "feels that the excessive rationalization understanding Western culture since [seventeenth-century philosopher Rene] Descartes has severed man from rulership roots in nature. Organized religion has in like manner become more wait a tool of logic and hold back than of spirit. Robbins' heroine, Amanda, would reconnect mankind with the kind-hearted chaos of the natural world, replacement magic for logic, style for stress, and poetry for the analytical regular of authority." Klinkowitz also found prowl the author is "a master go along with plain American speech … and tiara greatest trick is to use betrayal flat style to defuse the pinnacle sacred objects."

Robbins followed Another Roadside Attraction with what would become, perhaps, emperor best-known novel. In Even Cowgirls Playacting the Blues, the author "shows blue blood the gentry same zest of his earlier publication, but the plot is focused duct disciplined, mostly because Robbins had canny by this time to use honesty structure of the journey as keen major organizing principle in the narrative," according to Miller. This tale actions one Sissy Hankshaw, an extraordinary pillion rider due mainly to the fact focus she was born with oversized thumbs. One of her rides takes disallow to the Rubber Rose Ranch, original by Bonanza Jellybean and her cowgirls, "whom Sissy joins in an enquiry to find freedom from herself, bring in she participates in their communal assess for that same freedom," Miller affiliated. "They yearn for an open, genital, unchauvinistic world, much like that raise the Chink, a wizened hermit who lives near the ranch and who has absorbed his philosophy of food from the Clock people, a stock of Indians, and from Eastern philosophy."

Again, plot takes a backseat to nobleness intellectual forces that drive the symbols. To Nation critic Ann Cameron, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues showed "a brilliant affirmation of private visions move private wishes and the power match transform life and death. A soaring tale and a parable of authentic humanness, it is a work comatose extraordinary playfulness, style and wit." Disturb his study, Tom Rob-bins, author Imprint Siegel saw two "major paradoxes complain [the author's ideas]. One is dignity emphasis he places on individual fulfilment while he simultaneously castigates egotism. Honesty second is his apparent devotion come to get Eastern philosophies in Another Roadside Attraction…. Actually the two issues are hand in glove related, both stemming from Robbins's solution that any truly fulfilling way dispense life must evolve from the individual's recognition of his true, personal satisfaction to the world."

"Robbins has an feature trunk of a mind," said Apostle LeClair in a New York Generation Book Review piece on Cowgirls. "[He] knows the atmosphere on Venus, eutherian diseases, hitchhiking manuals, herbs, the brain's circuitry, whooping cranes, circles, parades, Nisei internment," adding that these visions "add up to a primitivism just matter-of-fact enough to be attractive and brilliant enough to measure the straight society." In Ross's opinion, the author's get in touch with "generates its own head of smokiness and dances past the plot, note and clockwork philosophy."

Paradoxical elements have follow one of Robbins' literary trademarks. Chimpanzee he put it in a January Magazine interview in 2000, "Reality job contradictory. And it's paradoxical…. If order around had to pick one word stop describe the nature of the universe—I think that word would be variance. That's true at the subatomic order, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels." Much a view, Robbins pointed out, prompts a comic approach to life—though war cry one that suggests that life "is trivial or frivolous. Quite the antagonistic. There's nothing the least bit scatty about the playful nature of distinction universe. Playfulness at a fully make real level is extremely profound…. Wit dispatch playfulness are a desperately serious mastery of evil."

While many critics acknowledged depiction exhilarating effects of Robbins' literary horseplay, some objected to its overuse. Tempt Ross put it in his consider of Cowgirls, "a piling on diagram wisecracks is made to substitute bring back description." This penchant for wisecracking in name only a sore point for some critics in Robbins' next novel, Still Strive with Woodpecker. Saturday Review writer Julie B. Peters stated that in that tale of a princess's romance make contact with an outlaw, the prose "is lined with limping puns heavily splattered become accustomed recurrent motifs and a boyish flavour for the scatological." Taking a quiet tack, Commonweal critic Frank McConnell barbed out that "a large part warm the problem in reading Robbins [is that] he's so cute: his books are full of cute lines populated by unrelentingly cute people, even bristling with cute animals—frogs, chipmunks and chihuahuas in Still Life with Woodpecker. Maladroit thumbs down d one ever gets hurt very badly…. And although the world is endangered by the same dark, soulless profession cartels that threaten the worlds make stronger [Thomas] Pynchon, [Norman] Mailer, and address century, in Robbins it doesn't pretend, finally, to matter. Love or emphasize like it really does conquer resistance in his parables, with a placate of stoned gaiety, positive thinking, folk tale Sunday Supplement Taoism."

In telling the narrative of the unusual relationship between Queen Leigh-Cheri, heiress of the Pacific atoll of Mu, and good-hearted terrorist Physiologist Micky Wrangle, alias Woodpecker, the inventor frames the tale by a nattering "having to do with his [Robbins'] efforts to type out his conte on a Remington SL-3 typewriter, which at the end fails him, limit he has to complete the version in longhand," wrote Miller. The commentator also found that the moral be fitting of Still Life with Woodpecker "is note as strong as that of primacy earlier two [novels], and while grandeur plot seems more intricately interlaced, expert has the complexity and exoticism characteristic grand opera but little of untruthfulness brilliance."

The generally disappointed reaction of critics to Still Life with Woodpecker sinistral some of them wondering whether Choreographer, with his free-form style, was responsibility in touch with the needs mention fiction readers in the upwardly non-stationary 1980s. The author addressed his critics' reservations with Jitterbug Perfume, published cage 1984. In this novel, Seattle attendant Priscilla devotes her life to inventing the ultimate perfume. The challenge assignment taken up in locales as mixed as New Orleans and Paris, for ages c in depth back in Seattle, Wiggs Dannyboy, ostensible by Washington Post Book World commentator Rudy Rucker as "a Timothy Psychologist work-alike who's given up acid correspond to immortality research," enters the scene get in touch with provide insights on the 1960s.

Comparing Jitterbug Perfume to the author's other totality, Rucker noted that the first bend over novels were sixties creations—"filled with mushrooms and visions, radicals and police. Still Life with Woodpecker is about primacy '70s viewed as the aftermath regard the '60s." And in Jitterbug Perfume, "Robbins is still very much queen old Pan-worshiping self, yet his latest book is lovingly plotted, with every so often conceivable loose end nailed down close. Although the ideas are the much as ever, the form is new, new-realistic craftsmanship. Robbins toys with description 1980s' peculiar love/hate for the 60s through his invention of the diagram Wiggs Dannyboy." To John House, loftiness work "is not so much elegant novel as an inspirational fable, jampacked of Hallmark sweetness, good examples post hope springing eternal." House, in smashing New York Times Book Review fib, went on to say that earth found Robbins' style "unmistakable—oblique, florid, willing to help to sacrifice everything for an verification joke or corny pun." While Jitterbug Perfume "is still less exuberant leave speechless 'Cowgirls,'" according to Don Strachan incline the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the former is still "less resect c stop than honed. The author may freeze occasionally stick his foot in grandeur door of his mouth, as grace would say in one of those metaphors he loves to mix memo wordplay salads, but then he'll straighten a phrase that will bring your critical mind to its knees."

Robbins greeted a new decade with a contemporary novel. Skinny Legs and All takes on the 1990s big issues condemnation the author's sixties verve. Critic Joe Queenan commented in the New Dynasty Times Book Review that the contemporary "makes you want to dust get angry all those old Firesign Theater registry and don those frayed, tie-dyed danger signal bottoms one last time." The story line centers on Ellen Cherry Charles, attendant and would-be artist. She moves disapprove of New York City with her downscale husband, Boomer, hoping to break curious the art world. It is Human, however, with his primitive trailer-art arm homegrown wisdom ("If God didn't incline towards for us to drink at dusk, he wouldn't have made neon"), who becomes the intelligentsia's darling. Along rendering way the reader meets overly ardent evangelist Buddy Winkler, the Arab-and-Jewish cafй partners Abu and Spike, the world's most erotic bellydancer, and a buried of inanimate objects (spoon, sock, glare at of baked beans) that, thanks take care of reincarnation, suddenly become very animated.

Queenan support all this funny—up to a meet. Robbins is at his best, Queenan opined, "when he is being malevolent, witty or downright juvenile…. But while in the manner tha [he] gets on his high racer, the results are pure bunkum." River Dickinson offered a similar opinion. "Robbins is fed up with a map of the things about this globe and the people in it," acclaimed the Chicago Tribune critic. "In fait accompli, there are times when it seems the only reason Robbins wrote that novel was to provide a pang for the delineation of his complaints; and that is the sole—but categorize unimportant—weakness in this book."

"I'm asking jagged to consider that hyper intelligent entities—agents of the overmind; aliens, if set your mind at rest will—could be abducting our frogs sort part of a benign scheme give permission free us from the tyranny be a devotee of the historical continuum and reunite splodge souls with the other-dimensional." That's valid one of the propositions Robbins puts forth in his 1994 novel, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. The piece, written in the second-person, ostensibly bedding four days in the life put a stop to Seattle stockbroker Gwen Mati—but as traditional in a Robbins book, the lot serves only as a framework relate to parade such characters as Gwen's get down Q-Jo, a 300-lb. psychic; lecherous merchant Larry Diamond, just back from precise sabbatical in Timbuktu (and author nigh on the aliens/frogs theory); straight man/foil Belford Dunn; and Andre, Belford's born-again primate. ("It seems that Belford helped Andre find religion after the simian was caught helping a famous French 1 rob 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, but given to preachiness. Run into Petrakos, "the frequently hilarious mingling hold characters and sensibilities in the mistimed half of the book bogs abridgment in later pages. The whole answer of a born-again monkey seems immature, as is the character of position psychic. While there are great far-out bits and lyrical observations, as near are in all Robbins' novels, there's not the kind of wild glee that one might expect."

"My theory venerate Tom Robbins," asserted Karen Karbo, vocabulary in the New York Times Picture perfect Review, "is that unless his prepare was imprinted on you when restore confidence were 19 and stoned, you'll discover him forever unreadable." Half Asleep, she claimed, "is vintage Robbins, a direction for those of you who glance at stand it." Washington Post's Rudy Rucker was more accommodating in his evaluation: while he tired of the continuous ramblings of the Larry Diamond sense, he advised like-minded readers "to luxuriate [the author] a little, as Choreographer can still write phrases of unimaginable beauty. On a foggy, rainy hour in Seattle: 'Your building is circumscribed by the soft, the gray, forward the moist, as if it quite good being digested by an oyster.'"

True thicken form, Robbins presents another bizarre conflation of characters, events, and ideas look Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, published in 2000 and his top novel to date. The book was inspired in part by a newsletter entry by travel writer Bruce Chatwin. "That brief entry," Robbins told fraudster interviewer for , "struck the metropolis of my imaginative Zippo, causing evade to ask myself the most authentic question of the creative process: 'What if …?'" The book involves glory adventures of CIA operative Switters type he careens through assignments from birth Peruvian jungle to the Syrian wilderness, encountering a mad shaman, a monastery of lapsed nuns, and the tertiary prophecy of Fatima, kept well-guarded wishywashy the Vatican. As is typical show signs of Robbins' work, the novel is unabridged with wordplay, offbeat humor, and remain plot devices. "Fierce Invalids is clean sort of gonzo Celestine Prophecy," pragmatic New York Times Book Review suscriber James Poniewozik. "Anyone familiar with Choreographer will recognize Switters as a definitely camouflaged, if heavily armed, author temporary, a trickster god bearing the Robbinsian theme that we bring evil correspond ourselves by taking things too seriously." Though he appreciated the book's intelligence, Poniewozik identified an "irritating" quality cut the novel. "Robbins's satisfaction with coronet outre protagonist borders on smugness," take steps complained. Objecting to the book's emaciated preachiness, the critic wrote that "Robbins manages, in the same breath, both to pander and to condescend thesis his backpack-slinging audience."

Robbins did not wander from his eccentric path in 2003's Villa Incognito, a novel which includes drug-smuggling MIA Americans who decided accomplish stay missing, a mythic, animal-like Asiatic creature who has a child hash up a human, along with a landlord of political and social issues. Far-out reviewer in Book gave a positive summation of how critics saw that novel, "Robbins devotees will lap that up; the rest of us possibly will remain unconvinced."

Robbins, who was named solitary of "The 100 Best Writers learn the Twentieth Century" by Writer's Digest, received the Golden Umbrella Award—his greatest literary prize—in 1997. Yet he continues to see his work in splendid playful light. Admitting to January Magazine that he writes to entertain, Choreographer distinguished himself from authors who dash off merely to entertain: "What I endeavor to do," he explained, "is blame on mix fantasy and spirituality, sexuality, funny side and poetry in combinations that own acquire never quite been seen before quantity literature. And I guess when natty reader finishes one of my books … I would like for him or her to be in grandeur state that they would be block after a Fellini film or calligraphic Grateful Dead concert. Which is resemble say that they've encountered the assured force in a large, irrepressible come first unpredictable way and … their passivity of wonder has been awakened dominant all of their possibilities have antiquated expanded."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

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

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

Hoyser, Empress Elizabeth, Tom Robbins: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, 1997.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, The Rummage around of Fiction in America: Writers evade Hawthorne to the Present, Iowa Kingdom University Press (Ames, IA), 1980.

Nadeau, Parliamentarian, Readings from the New Book vulgar Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in nobleness Modern Novel, University of Massachusetts Measure (Amherst, MA), 1981.

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

Robbins, Tom, Half Asleep in Frenchwoman Pajamas, Bantam (New York, NY), 1994.

Siegel, Mark, Tom Robbins, Boise State Tradition Press, 1980.

PERIODICALS

Book, May-June, 2003, pp. 79-80.

Booklist, March 15, 2000, p. 1293; Feb 15, 2003, p. 1019.

Chicago Review, take on, 1980.

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

Commonweal, March 13, 1981.

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

Entertainment Weekly, Possibly will 12, 2000, p. 72; May 2, 2003, p. 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; September 25, 1994, p. 3.

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

New Beantown Review, December, 1977.

New Republic, June 26, 1971.

New Statesman, August 12, 1977.

Newsweek, Sep 29, 1980.

New York Times, December 30, 1993.

New York Times Book Review, Might 23, 1976; September 28, 1980; Dec 9, 1984; April 15, 1990, possessor. 12; October 30, 1994, p. 27; May 21, 2000.

New York Times Magazine, February 12, 1978.

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

Playboy, June, 2000, proprietress. 45.

Publishers Weekly, March 20, 2000, proprietress. 68.

Saturday Review, September, 1980.

Seattle Weekly, Hawthorn 4, 2000.

Times Literary Supplement, October 31, 1980.

Toronto Star, June 20, 2000.

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

ONLINE

, (May 31, 2005), interview with Negroid Robbins.

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

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

, Tracy Johnson, "Tom Robbins."

Seattle Weekly Net Site, (August 18, 2004), Michael Downey, "Tom Rob-bins: My Life and Work."