Tom Robbins, comic novelist of American counterculture, dies aged 92 | Books

Tom Robbins, whose novels read as a hit of literary LSD, filled with amazing characters, manic metaphors and counterculture, have died aged 92 years.

The author of works, including even cowgirls, gets blues, another way next to the road and still life with Woodpecker, died Sunday, his wife, Alexa Robbins, wrote on Facebook. The post did not mention a cause.

“He was surrounded by his family and loyal pets. Through these difficult last chapters he was brave, funny and sweet, ”wrote Alexa Robbins. “He asked for people to remember him by reading his books.”

Robbins spoiled the hippy sensitivity of young people who started in the early 1970s with books that had an overall philosophy of what he called “serious play disease” and a mandate to be pursued in the most outlandic ways possible . As he wrote in half sleeping in Frog Pajamas: “Minds were made for blow.”

Robbins’ characters were over the top, from the wall and around the swing. Among them was Sissy Hankshaw, the hitchhist with the nine inches of thumbs in even cowgirls get blues, and Switters, the pasifist CIA that is in love in a nun in harsh void home from warm climate. Skinny legs and everyone contained a speech canned pork and beans, a dirty sock and turn around Norman, a performance artist whose action consisted of moving imperceptibly.

“What I am trying to do is, among other things, to mix imagination and spirituality, sexuality, humor and poetry in combinations that have never been fully seen before in literature,” Robbins said in a 2000 interview. “And I guess when a reader finishes one of my books … I would like him or her to be in the state, that they would be in after a Fellini movie or a Grateful Dead concert. “

Born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, Robbins grew up there and in Richmond, Virginia, in a family he once described as “kind of a southern baptist version of The Simpsons”. He said he dictated stories to his mother at the age of five and further developed his writing skills at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and worked at the school’s newspaper with Tom Wolfe, who would continue to write the right things and Electric Kool-Aid Acid test.

Robbins worked as an editor, reporter and critic for newspapers in Richmond and Seattle, where he moved in the 1960s in search of a more progressive atmosphere than the South offered. He had a writing epiphany while undergoing a concert from Doors from 1967.

“Jimmied had the lock on my language box and crushed the last of my literary inhibitions,” he wrote in 2014 -the memoir entitled Tibetan Peach Pie. “When I read the sections I had written that midnight, I discovered a ease, a freedom of expression, a syntax at the same time wild and precise.”

What came next was 1971’s another attraction at the roadside, the roundabout of how the mummified, uninhabited body of Jesus was stolen from the Vatican and ended up on a hot dog stand in the US north-west. Five years later, his second book, even Cowgirl’s blues, where Sissy Hitchhiked his way through a world of sex, drugs and mystery, made him a cult favorite.

His novels often had strong female protagonists, which made him especially popular with female readers. And while he appealed to the youth culture, the literary business never warms to Robbins. Critics said his reasons were formal and his style overpowered.

Robbins wrote his books in Longhand about legal pillows and produced only a few pages a day and with no plot beforehand. An attempt to use an electric typewriter ended with the author based it with a piece of wood.

He worked over word choice and said he liked to “remind reader and author that language is not the frosting, it is the cake”. As a result, his works were flooding with wild -eyed metaphors.

“Words spread like a skin disease in a nudist colony,” he wrote in thin legs and all. In Jitterbug -Perfume, he described a falling man as going down “as a sack of meteorites that addressed special delivery to gravity.”

Robbins had three children with his wife, Alexa.