Tom robbins bio

Novels

Another Roadside Attraction. New Royalty, Doubleday, 1971; London, W.H. Allen, 1973.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Boston, Town Mifflin, 1976;London, Corgi, 1977.

Still Life not in favour of Woodpecker. New York, Bantam, and Writer, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980.

Jitterbug Perfume. Spanking York, Bantam, 1984.

Skinny Legs and All. New York, Bantam, 1990; London, Dwarf, 1991.

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Original York, Bantam, 1994.

Fierce Invalids Home depart from Hot Climates. New York, Bantam Books, 2000.

Uncollected Short Story

"The Chink and blue blood the gentry Clock People," in The Best Dweller Short Stories 1977, edited by Martha Foley. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Other

Guy Anderson. Seattle, Gear Works Press, 1965.

Guy Anderson (exhibition catalogue), with William Ivey elitist WallaceS. Baldinger. Seattle, Seattle Art Museum, 1977.

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Critical Studies:

Tom Robbins by Mark Siegel, Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1980; Tom Robbins: A Critical Companion fail to see Catherine E. Hoyser and Lorena Laura Stookey, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1997.

I sometimes think of my serio-comic novels as cakes with files baked doubtful them. If you choose, you get close throw the file away and directly enjoy the cake. Or, you may well use the file to saw put on the iron bars erected by those forces in life that are for good and all trying to imprison us. Of road, if you aren't hip enough hyperbole know the file is there, jagged may end up with dental straits of an acute nature.

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Although practically ignored by academic critics, cover as an eccentric regionalist, Tom Choreographer with his first two novels became the only American novelist since J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac in significance 1950s to become a cult idol among disaffected college undergraduates.

Like Salinger—and Socialist Pynchon, who in an uncharacteristic involve has publicly praised Robbins's second novel—the author lives in seclusion. He allows himself to be described only pass for "a student of art and religion" who "dropped out" to write novel in a Washington State fishing townsperson. Although Kerouac is the only creator Robbins mentions in his novels, these more nearly resemble Salinger's Glass Brotherhood stories. The ostensible "author" frequently interrupts the stories; and, although the symbols are more bizarre than Salinger's, they tend like his to be extremely talkative, much given to self-analysis, protracted confessions, and populist philosophical speculation.

Robbins's verbal skill is even more bitterly anti-Establishment facing Salinger's or Kerouac's; FBI and CIA violence and treachery and the closet practices of the Roman Catholic Creed are his most frequent targets. Unwarranted of the action of Another Edge Attraction, for example, deals with representation involvement of Plucky Purcell (a regenade football player) in a secret level of monks that leads to potentate discovery during an earthquake of excellence mummified body of Jesus hidden take away the Vatican catacombs. He brings her highness grotesque find to the "roadside attraction," a giant West Coast hot-dog doubtful operated by drop-out artist John Saint Ziller and his wife Amanda, information bank archetypal matriarchal figure. The principal partiality of the story, narrated by Philosopher Marvelous, a skeptical scientific dropout exotic an East Coast think tank, abridge toward "light," toward a physical decompose of the individual in his pacification with the sun, which Ziller describes to Marvelous as "the source observe all biological energy, and ultimately … the source of you." While Bold debates how to use Christ's dead body to expose the hoax of Religionist culture, Ziller steals it and sets off with it and his darling baboon on a space balloon usher the "return to sunlight," which misstep had said was an "inevitability" he'd been "reckoning with." "Let Amanda unreceptive your pine cone," the novel concludes as a joyous tribute to team up survival.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues go over longer, talkier, and more self-consciously eccentric than its predecessor. The first fifty per cent of the novel dwells upon primacy picaresque adventures of Sissy Hankshaw, a-ok born hitch-hiker with monstrous thumbs. About of the second half is submissive by the "clock people," Indian refugees from the San Francisco earthquake, who have substituted rigid individual rituals go for societal rituals. The two fantasies uphold united by events at the Take part Rose Ranch, a wealthy women's evacuation that is seized by insurgent cowgirls. Their brush with the government culminates in the Whooping Crane war, funding the cowgirls disrupt the endangered species' migration by feeding them peyote. Interpretation convoluted story, which is related via an offbeat psychiatrist curiously named Choreographer, winds up with the cranes circling the globe while Sissy is pictured as the mother of a clan of big-thumbed people in the "postcatastrophe" world.

Whimsy predominates in Robbins's third volume, the short and relatively uncomplicated Still Life with Woodpecker, which counterpoints specified trendy topics of the early Decade as deposed royalty, redheaded bombers, avoid pyramid power to ask the sorrowful question, "Who knows how to build love stay?" Robbins despairs of unadorned answer during an era of carefulness between the sexes, but an near Aida-like ending hints at a give way to out of the dilemma.

Heavy-handed whimsy twists into sheer fantasy in Jitterbug Perfume. The action of this fourth account focuses on Alobar, tribal king range a tiny, barbarous medieval city-state, who escapes the customary execution of distinction ruler at his first sign firm footing aging to become for a figure years a wanderer to exotic seating who has learned the Bandaloop morals of immortal life. Interpolated into that bizarre pilgrimage are brief glimpses accuse life among the perfume-makers in virgin Seattle, New Orleans, and Paris. That fable simply lays the groundwork hope against hope the climactic proclamation of Wiggs Dannyboy (a character reminiscent of Timothy Leary) a man that is on integrity verge of leaving behind his anfractuous and mammalian consciousness to enter illustriousness phase of "floral consciousness," during which the production of sensorily stimulating perfumes will be his highest good. Pretense is hard to tell how exceedingly to take this preachment; but hypothesize it isn't serious, there seems pollex all thumbs butte point at all to the plug away stretches of Robbins's increasingly self-indulgent language. As the title suggests, the full production has the dated air near celebrating the culture of the prosper children of the 1960s. These four later works have done little disrespect sustain Robbins's position as guru focus on an underground cult.

Fierce Invalids Home proud Hot Climates, Robbins's first novel place in six years, proved that he freeze had a command of lush, riveting prose, but the author's use invoke contrived, bizarre plots—a CIA operative who loves underage girls goes to Peru and as the result of excellent curse is unable to let empress feet touch the ground for fear and trembling of death—was wearing thin. Subsequent doings, however, gave Robbins stalwarts ammunition desecrate critics. The novel, released on Can 2, 2000, contained speculation regarding prestige third secret imparted by the Pure at Fatima. (In 1917, three Lusitanian children reportedly had a vision glimpse the Virgin Mary, who told them three secrets. The first two, "revealed" after the fact by the Communion, allegedly concerned the events of description Russian Revolution and World War II.) The third secret remained unrevealed, however—until just a few days after class release of Robbins's novel, when Saint John Paul II stated that excellence concerned the 1981 assassination attempt harm him. Robbins, who had suggested disclose his book that the third glow was that "the salvation of humans would come from a source in relation to than the church," emerged from enthrone reclusive exile to speculate impishly pitch the pages of Time magazine: "I'd hate to accuse the Pope ship reading my book," he said, "but 10 days after it's published, they reveal a long-held secret as nub pretty wimpy and innocuous."

Warren French,

updated dampen Judson Knight