Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (novel)

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a 1976 novel by Tom Robbins.

Plot summary

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, and religion.

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.

Literary significance & criticism

"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...
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