Tom Robbins, the author whose offbeat comic novels were embraced by both bohemian and mainstream readers in the 1970s and ’80s, has died at 92, the New York Times reports.

Robbins was raised in North Carolina and Virginia and educated at Virginia Commonwealth University. He later moved to Seattle, where he worked as a journalist, hosting a radio show and writing for the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

He made his literary debut in 1971 with Another Roadside Attraction, a novel about a couple who convert an abandoned restaurant into a roadside zoo and hot dog stand. He followed that up five years later with what would become his best-known novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which follows a hitchhiker with huge thumbs; the book was adapted into a 1993 film directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Uma Thurman.

His other novels include Jitterbug Perfume, Still Life With Woodpecker, Skinny Legs and All, and Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. His last book, the memoir Tibetan Peach Pie, was published in 2014; a critic for Kirkus called it “a fitting cap to a sui generis career.”

Robbins’ admirers paid tribute to him on social media. On the platform X, singer-songwriter Ben Lee wrote, “Goodbye Tom Robbins thank you for the friendship, wisdom, playfulness, collaboration, mysticism, love and inspiration. You discovered a hidden portal and you invited your readers and friends to explore it with you. Thank you for being a guide in this bizarre labyrinth. Vale!”

And journalist Dave Segal posted, “RIP, Tom Robbins, whose hilarious, far-fetched similes and metaphors in Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Another Roadside Attraction, Still Life With Woodpecker, and Jitterbug Perfume kept me laughing, despite reading them during those apocalyptically shitty Reagan years.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.