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, Washington. He was 92.

His son Fleetwood confirmed the death.

Alongside works by Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins books, 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 bestseller status.

With their meandering plots, pop-philosophical asides and frequent jabs at social convention and organised religion, 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.

Take a representative line like this, from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, his second novel: “An afternoon squeezed out of Mickey’s mousy snout, an afternoon carved from mashed potatoes and lye, an afternoon scraped out of the dog’s dish of meteorology.”

New York Times News Service