For all his influence on the West Coast literary scene, author Tom Robbins has produced a relatively small output of novels--just six in over twenty-five years. The reason for this scarcity, the author told the New York Times in 1993, is based on the...

The novelist Tom Robbins was one of the foremost writers of the 1970s and 1980s counterculture, joining Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Pirsig as the gurus of the youth market. His novels wittily debunked the powers that be and challenged conceptions of...

Thomas Eugene Robbins (born July 22, 1936 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina) is an American author. His novels are complex, often wild stories with strong social undercurrents, a satirical bent, and obscure details. His novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues...

In Town Yann Martel and Tom Robbins Sunday, May 4, 2003 Yann Martel came from almost nowhere and won the Man Booker Prize last year for his imaginative, audacious yarn, "Life of Pi." The Booker Foundation called it a novel "in which...

WILD DUCKS FLYING BACKWARD The Short Writings of Tom Robbins TOM ROBBINS Bantam. 255 pp. $25. BY BRENT ANDREW BOWLES "WILD DUCKS Flying Backward" is a collection of almost 70 short pieces by Tom Robbins. The book contains travel...

Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, will publish a new novel this fall by Tom Robbins called B is For Beer. According to HarperCollins executive editor David Hirshey, who is editing the book, it is about 100 pages long, and takes the form of a...

Judicial candidate Noach Dear drives the wrong way down a one-way street to avoid an interview with Andrew Kirtzman. Tom Robbins sheds some unflattering light on the Taxi and Limousine Commission (where Noach Dear is a commissioner). Darren Dopp will cooperate with that...

The novels of Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), and Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), are set mostly in Washington state and the Dakotas, yet at first glance seem to have little in common with the formula Western or with Western writing in general. However, a more than cursory reading of Robbins's novels shows that climactic showdowns and shootouts are present, conflicts between unambiguously good and bad guys are, at least temporarily, resolved, an...

In recent years we have seen wild enthusiasm, much discussion, and some handwringing for the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas Pynchon. The latest discovery is Tom Robbins. Several qualities distinguish the novels by these contemporary cult figures from those of authors such as [Henry] James. The most obvious characteristic is their enormous popularity, which entails equally large financial rewards….

Although the fiction of Tom Robbins may not yet appear on the syllabi of many surveys of contemporary literature, his novels seem to have something like the same following among college students as the fiction of Barth or Pynchon did before they became fully legitimated as makers of elitist art. It is interesting from our point of view, however, that concepts from physics, which are for the most part implicit as structuring principles in the art of the more established novelists, are treated in the fiction ...