Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1976. It was Robbins’s breakout bestseller — the book that moved him from cult status to mainstream commercial success — and remains his most famous novel, combining feminist politics, nature mysticism, sexual comedy, and Robbins’s trademark digressive philosophy into a picaresque of American highway culture.
Sissy Hankshaw is born with preposterously large thumbs — grotesque by normal standards but perfect for the one activity she devotes her life to: hitchhiking. She becomes the greatest hitchhiker the world has ever known, crossing America thousands of times, seeking not destinations but motion itself. Her thumbs are her gift: not a deformity but a specialization, an evolutionary adaptation for a woman whose purpose is pure, purposeless travel.
The plot (insofar as Robbins’s novels have plots) brings Sissy to the Rubber Rose Ranch — a beauty spa that has been taken over by its cowgirl staff, who refuse to return it to its male owners and establish a feminist utopia of horseback riding, peyote, and sexual self-determination. Their conflict with the authorities (represented by a Countess who manufactures feminine hygiene products) becomes Robbins’s vehicle for examining wildness: the wildness that civilization has domesticated in women, in animals, in nature, and in language itself.
The novel’s philosophy — articulated through a character called the Chink, a Japanese-American hermit who lives on a clock-shaped butte — is Robbins’s most sustained: time is not linear but cyclical; motion is more real than position; the thumb (passive, receptive, opposing the grasping fingers) represents a feminine principle of resistance through receptivity rather than force.
Gus Van Sant’s 1993 film adaptation (starring Uma Thurman) was a commercial failure but introduced the novel to a new generation of readers.
Collecting Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1976): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Signed first edition: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $10–$25
Robbins’s biggest commercial success and the novel most associated with his name. Larger first printing than Another Roadside Attraction makes copies more available, but signed copies command strong premiums.