Robert Pirsig, author of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, dead at 88
Part road trip and part philosophical treatise on the nature of ‘quality’, ‘Zen’ would become a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s after being passed over by 100 publishers
Robert M. Pirsig, whose philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became a million-selling classic and cultural touchstone after more than 100 publishers turned it down, died Monday at age 88.
Pirsig’s publishing house, William Morrow, announced that he died at his home in South Berwick, Maine. He had been in failing health.
Like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road from a generation earlier, the book’s path to the best-seller list was long and unlikely. It began as an essay he wrote after he and Chris rode from Minnesota to the Dakotas and grew to a manuscript of hundreds of thousands of words.
After the entire industry seemed to shun it, William Morrow took on the book, with editor James Landis writing at the time that he found it “brilliant beyond belief.”
Some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof
Pirsig’s novel was in part an ode to the motorcycle and how he saw the world so viscerally travelling on one, compared to the TV-like passivity of looking out at the window of a car.