Tom Robbins is an American novelist known for his surreal and well-researched books, characterized by a precise, bizarre choice of words and themes involving social commentary and enhanced states of consciousness. He has written only a handful of highly acclaimed novels since the 1970s and won the Golden Umbrella award in 1997. Robbins’ trademark is opening each novel with an improbable sentence that makes sense in the context of the larger work.
Tom Robbins is an American novelist known for his complex, surreal and well-researched books. He has written only a handful of novels since the beginning of his career in the 1970s, but all are highly acclaimed and carefully crafted. His style is characterized by a precise, if bizarre, choice of words and themes involving social commentary and enhanced states of consciousness, whether through drugs, mysticism or religion. Tom Robbins has also produced a collection of his shorter works, Wild Ducks Flying Backward, published in 2005. His second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), was adapted into a film by Gus Van Sant and starred Uma Thurman in 1996.
Tom Robbins was born as Thomas Eugene Robbins on July 22, 1936 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. He began studying journalism at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia in 1954, but dropped out soon after due to disciplinary issues. Robbins moved to New York City, where he hoped to start a career as a poet. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1957 and served three years in Korea.
In 1960, after returning to the United States, Tom Robbins tried his hand at formal education again, attending the Richmond Professional Institute – now Virginia Commonwealth University – in Richmond, Virginia. He studied art and served as editor of his campus newspaper. Robbins also secured a job as copy editor for a local newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, during his college years. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Tom Robbins entered a master’s program at the University of Washington’s School of Far Eastern Studies in Seattle, where he continued to work for local newspapers.
Tom Robbins moved to LaConner, Washington, where he has lived ever since, in 1970, and began his career as a novelist, publishing his first book, Another Roadside Attraction in 1971. Since then he has steadily, albeit slowly, produced brilliant novels. He claims that he writes by hand, composing about 500 words a day, and that he has no plan for his novels as he writes them, but instead focuses on each sentence and lets the larger work take shape on its own. After completing each novel, Robbins takes a year off to travel. In 1997, Robbins won the Golden Umbrella award at Bumbershoot, an annual music and arts festival held in Seattle.
One of Robbins’ trademarks is that he opens each novel with an extremely improbable sentence, which then makes sense in the context of the larger work. For example, Skinny Legs and All (1990), begins: “It was a bright, thawed, willowy day in early spring, and the newlyweds were driving across the country in a big roast turkey.” Tom Robbins used a very unusual device in Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994), writing the entire book in the second person. Robbins’ sense of humor and creative dexterity with language is evident in nearly every sentence of his books, and for fans of his, each of his novels is worth the three-year wait or more.
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