TOM ROBBINS “I’ve learned to trust my intuition”: The Obituary & Interview

Tom Robbins died in February this year; I wrote his obituary for the Guardian a couple of days later, and they ran in one day short of the Ides of March. The piece as printed had a few cuts, so what follows here is my original (one cut was the word “hippie”, after an argument about their changing the spelling to “hippy” as their style book dictated. The singular of hippie is hippy, they said. Hippie is singular I said, emphatically. I was there! So they rewrote around it.) If you’d like to see it, you can link to the online version here.

I’ve attached my interview with Tom, which I referenced in the obit, and which I’d intended to post with the obit attached. I found it in the drafts section of my Medium account in December.It originally appeared in issue 23 of Headpress magazine, probably in 2002. The header which introduces it was theirs…

TOM ROBBINS: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

Tom Robbins, who has died aged 92, was one of the last “cult” novelists who emerged from the Sixties. Often compared for his humour to Kurt Vonnegut or Richard Brautigan, his books sat on readers’ shelves alongside novels by Richard Farina, Peter S Beagle, Philip K Dick, Ken Kesey or Thomas Pynchon. Rolling Stone called his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction (1971), “the quintessential novel of the Sixties,” but it did poorly until the paperback edition became a word-of-mouth best-seller.