Tom Robbins

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > American Literature: Biographies

Robbins, Tom (1936–), North Carolina‐born author of bizarre fiction very popular in paperback. Another Roadside Attraction (1971) is set at the hot dog stand north of Seattle (the author's home area) owned by John and Amanda Ziller, whose friend Plucky Purcell chances on the mummified body of Christ, which he delivers to them as an adornment for their place of business. His next novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), almost equally fantastic, is a picaresque tale of a hitchhiking girl with vastly oversized thumbs who ends up at a wild health ranch for cowgirls. Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) deals with the daughter of a foreign king exiled in Seattle who has a love affair with a rebellious young American who believes in remaking the world with dynamite and drugs and from whom she learns how to decipher cabalistic messages, of which the most meaningful is found in the pictures and text of a pack of Camel cigarettes. Robbins's eccentric themes, somewhat in the vein of Vonnegut, Brautigan, and Pynchon, are treated in a style marked by whimsical similes and wild wisecracks. His fourth novel, Jitterbug Perfume (1984), is in the vein of the earlier ones as marked in one passage: “It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and agressive, like the thunder lizards.” It was followed by Skinny Legs and All (1990), about exotic experiences of a newly married couple in New York City, and the erotic, comic Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994).