| Even Cowgirls Get the Blues | |
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Cover of first edition (hardcover) |
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| Author(s) | Tom Robbins |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Publication date | 1976 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 365 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-395-24305-X |
| OCLC Number | 1993290 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.5/4 |
| LC Classification | PZ4.R636 Ev PS3568.O233 |
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a 1976 novel by Tom Robbins.
Contents |
Sissy Hankshaw is a woman born with a mutation of enormously large thumbs, though she considers it a gift. The novel covers various topics, including free love, drug use, political rebellion, animal rights, body odor, religion, and beets.
Sissy makes the most of her thumbs by becoming a hitchhiker and she travels to New York. She becomes a model for the Countess, a male homosexual tycoon of feminine hygiene products. He introduces her to a staid Mohawk named Julian Gitche whom she later marries. In her later travels she encounters, among many others, a sexually open cowgirl named Bonanza Jellybean and an itinerant escapee from a Japanese internment camp happily mislabeled the Chink. Robbins finally inserts himself into the novel as a character as well.
"Cowgirls" was a favorite of the late 1970's anarchist hippie counterculture. Robbins writes short chapters filled with philosophical asides and quips (such as noting that because amoebas reproduce by binary fission, the first amoeba is still alive) and often speaking to the reader (chapter 88 begins with the narrator noting that the book now has as many chapters as a piano has keys).
The novel was made into a 1993 film directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, Pat Morita, Angie Dickinson, Keanu Reeves, John Hurt, Rain Phoenix, Ed Begley, Jr., Carol Kane, Victoria Williams, Sean Young, Crispin Glover, Roseanne Arnold, Buck Henry, Grace Zabriskie, and Treva Jeffryes. Tom Robbins himself was the narrator.
In 2008, Seattle's Book-it Repertory Theatre adapted the novel for the stage.
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was first published in 1976 by Houghton Mifflin. It was released as both a hardcover and paperback novel concurrently.
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