American author Tom Robbins, known for his fantastical adventure novels, died on Sunday surrounded by family and pets. He was 92.
Robbins's death was announced by Alexa Robbins, his wife of 36 years.
"My beloved Tom peacefully passed away," Alexa Robbins wrote on Facebook. "Throughout these difficult last chapters, he was brave, funny and sweet."
Robbins grew up in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and later in Richmond, Virginia, where he was named "Most Mischievous Boy" by his high school. He once described his family as "kind of a Southern Baptist version of 'Simpsons.'"
Robbins said he was reading stories aloud to his mother at 5 years old. He developed his writing skills further at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, working on the school newspaper with Tom Wolfe, who would go on to write "The Right Stuff" and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."
After completing his military draft with the U.S. Air Force, Robbins attended Richmond Professional Institute, where he worked as an editor. He moved to Seattle, Washington in the 1960s to continue working as a newspaper reporter and critic while immersing himself in the hippie movement.
In 1967, he found inspiration to take his writing into a wild and unfettered new direction while attending a concert by The Doors.
The concert "had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions," he wrote in the 2014 memoir "Tibetan Peach Pie."
"When I read over the paragraphs I'd written that midnight, I detected an ease, a freedom of expression, a syntax simultaneously wild and precise."
Robbins published his first book in 1971, but his real breakthrough came in 1976 with "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." The tale about a hitchhiker girl with nine-inch thumbs eventually sold more than a million copies and transferred to the silver screen in 1993 under the direction of Gus Van Sant, with Uma Thurman in the lead.
Robbins's "Skinny Legs and All" (1990) featured a talking can of pork and beans, a dirty sock, and Turn Around Norman, a performance artist whose act consisted of moving imperceptibly as key cast members in the plot. "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates" (2000) had Switters, a pacifist wheelchair-bound CIA operative, fall in love with a nun.
Robbins's quirky style, adorned with fantastic metaphors, led The New York Times to describe him as "one of our best practitioners of high foolishness."
"If you open one of his novels, you'll still find him there," Alexa Robbins said. "He'll be laughing, dancing and sharing his crazy wisdom with you."
Never a friend of the typewriter, Robbins wrote his books by hand on legal pads. With nothing plotted in advance, he let his stories unfold wherever they would take him.
With a firm belief that "language is not the frosting, it's the cake," Robbins labored intensely over each word before finishing a sentence, sometimes writing barely a page a day. As a result, he published only one book every five years or so -- a rhythm that never changed throughout his career.
Robbins, who had three children, lived with his wife, in La Conner, Washington, 70 miles north of Seattle.