is 68 today. The Writer’s Almanac tells this about Robbins:
He taught himself to read when he was five years old, and around the same time he started dictating stories to his mother. One of the stories was about a pilot who crashes on a desert island and discovers a brown cow with yellow spots. Robbins recently said, “I wouldn’t find that story out of place in what I’m doing now, and so I guess I haven’t changed all that much.”
Robbins’s best known novel is probably Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1974).