Trivia

He sat on the board of directors of The Greater Seattle Bureau of Fearless Ideas (formerly 826 Seattle), "a nonprofit writing and tutoring center dedicated to helping youth, ages six to 18, improve their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.".

His last work, published in 2014, was Tibetan Peach Pie, a self-declared "un-memoir".

Robbins won in 1997 the Bumbershoot Golden Umbrella Award for Lifetime Achievement in the arts that is presented annually by the Bumbershoot arts festival in Seattle.

His 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was adapted into the 1993 film version by Gus Van Sant.

In 1953, he enlisted in the Air Force after receiving his draft notice, spending a year as a meteorologist in Korea, followed by two years in the Special Weather Intelligence unit of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska.

Robbins attended Warsaw High School (class of 1949) and Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Virginia, where he won the Senior Essay Medal.

Robbins lived in La Conner, Washington, from 1970, where he wrote nine of his books.

Robbins defended, in print, Indian mystic Osho, although he was never a follower. Robbins spent three weeks at ceremonial sites in Mexico and Central America with mythologist Joseph Campbell, and studied mythology in Greece and Sicily with the poet Robert Bly. Robbins also traveled to Timbuktu.

On September 2, 2023, a "King for a Day" gala and parade was held in Robbins's honor in his home city of La Conner, Washington. The event also raised money for a children's art program at the local library.

He enrolled at Washington and Lee University to major in journalism, leaving at the end of his sophomore year after being disciplined by his fraternity for bad behavior and failing to earn a letter in basketball.

Tom Robbins was an American novelist. His most notable works are "seriocomedies" (also known as "comedy dramas").

In 2015, Robbins was awarded the Willamette Writers' Lifetime Achievement Award and received the award at the Gala Awards Event at the Willamette Writers Conference on August 8, 2015.

In 1987 he was discharged from the Air Force and returned to Richmond, Virginia, where his poetry readings at the Rhinoceros Coffee House led to his gaining a reputation on the local bohemian scene.

He was friends with directors Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph, as well, and had small speaking parts in five feature films.

During his brief stint in New York in 1965 Robbins joined the New York Filmmakers' Cinematheque.

The Robbins family resided in Blowing Rock before moving to Warsaw, Virginia, when the author was still a young boy. In adulthood, Robbins has described his young self as a "hillbilly".

In the mid-sixties, as a member of the Seattle Arts scene, Robbins reviewed art for several publications in Seattle, wrote essays for museum catalogs, organized gallery exhibits, and was the self-described ringleader in a "boisterous neo-Dada gang of guerilla artists, the Shazam Society".

Robbins also wrote numerous short stories and essays, mostly collected in the volume Wild Ducks Flying Backward, and one novella, "B Is for Beer".

In 2000, Robbins was named one of the 100 Best Writers of the 20th Century by Writer's Digest magazine, while the legendary Italian critic Fernanda Pivano called Robbins "the most dangerous writer in the world".

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Robbins regularly published articles and essays in Esquire magazine, and also contributed to Playboy, The New York Times, and GQ.