Tom Robbins, Whose Comic Novels Drew a Cult Following, Dies at 92

Tom Robbins, whose cosmically comic novels about gargantuan-thumbed hitchhikers, stoned secret agents and mystic stockbrokers caught hold of millions of readers in the 1970s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in La Conner, Wash. He was 92.

His son Fleetwood confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.

Alongside works by Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins paperbacks, dog-eared and torn, were common sights on the bookshelves and bedside milk crates of the late hippie era, between the tail end of the Vietnam War and the rise of Ronald Reagan’s America. He became one of the rare writers to achieve both a cult following and mega-best-seller status.

With their meandering plots, pop-philosophical asides and frequent jabs at social convention and organized religion, Mr. Robbins’s books were the perfect accompaniment to acid trips, Grateful Dead shows and weekend yoga retreats, long before those things became middle-class and mainstream.

Though he kept writing into the 21st century, he continually chose titles that emanated the era’s Day-Glo whimsy, like “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1976), “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas” (1994) and “Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates” (2000).

His story lines were secondary and hard to explain; one reads a Tom Robbins novel for the verve of a well-wrought sentence, not a taut narrative. His literary currency was exaggeration, irony, bathos and the comic mythopoetic, combined for an effect that was truly his own.