Long before "Another Roadside Attraction" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" leavened the raw dough of '60s literature with the cosmic whimsy that allowed it to rise, Tom Robbins was living the freeform life of an East-meets-West Zen avatar/space cowboy.

Born the son of a power company executive in Blowing Rock, N.C., Robbins was a class clown and closet reader who molted as a teen from the straight life at roughly the same time kindred spirits Jack Kerouac and the Beats hit the road.

Robbins' search for self-discovery took a more circuitous route than Route 66 however, and included a three-year stint, from 1957 to 1959, in the Air Force as a meteorologist in Florida and South Korea. It was during his overseas tour that Robbins attended classes in Japanese culture and aesthetics in Tokyo that would significantly shape his unorthodox worldview.

Robbins spent the 1960s as a newspaper copy editor, columnist and art critic, migrating from Richmond, Va., to New York's Greenwich Village to San Francisco and finally Seattle. Along the way, he took part in many of the "happenings" of the day, including lectures by Timothy Leary, a "legalize marijuana" rally with Allen Ginsberg and a South American field trip with mythology professor Joseph Campbell.

It was in 1967, while writing a fevered midnight review of a Doors concert for Seattle's underground Helix newspaper, that Robbins happened upon his fictional "voice," that of a highly informed, unapologetically libidinous, free-associating enlightened soul who fully appreciates the cosmic joke of human existence.

At 70, Robbins is as playful and engaging as ever. With eight novels and a new collection of short fiction and nonfiction, "Wild Ducks Flying Backward," to appease his fans during the often-lengthy wait between novels, he remains the turned-on, tuned-in and drop-dead funny master prankster of his generation.

What would this intrepid inner-space explorer have to say on the topic of money? And what would he count as the biggest thrill of his life? Press on, gentle reader ...

Bankrate: You're not typically thought of as a Southern writer, nor was Hunter S. Thompson, yet the two of you (arguably with an assist from another Southerner, Tom Wolfe) changed the American literary landscape. To what extent did your Southern upbringing influence your work?

Tom Robbins: The American South has, of course, a long and impressive literary tradition, but because I began dictating stories to my mother at age five, having already announced my intention to be a writer, I was probably much too young to have been influenced by that tradition in any conscious way. Maybe there's just something in the soil down there, in the lushness, the weather, or the Scotch-Irish gene pool. As I grew a bit older, my parents allowed me to roam freely in nature -- we lived in the Appalachian Mountains -- to go to the movies and the library as often as I pleased, and to mingle with the gypsies, moonshiners, religious snake-handlers and old eccentric hillbilly gents, many of whom were colorful and hypnotic storytellers. My imagination was thus perpetually nourished.

Life in the South proceeds more leisurely than in the rest of the land, and that very languor may help keep imagination alive there. In the fast-paced competitive environment where there's little time for daydreams, reflection or language for language's sake, human imagination cannot thrive. Eventually, I was to find the South socially repressive, but not before it gave me an appetite for enchantment.