Robert M. Pirsig, Author of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ Dies at 88 -
By PAUL VITELLOAPRIL 24, 2017
Robert M. Pirsig, whose “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” a dense
and discursive novel of ideas, became an unlikely publishing phenomenon in the mid-1970s and a touchstone in the waning days of the counterculture, died on Monday at his home in South Berwick, Me.
Mr. Pirsig was a college writing instructor and freelance technical writer when the novel — its full title was “Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” — was published in 1974 to critical acclaim and explosive popularity, selling a million copies in its first year and several million more since.
In a foreword to the book, Mr. Pirsig told readers
that despite its title, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” should “in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice.”
He added, “It’s not very factual on motorcycles either.”
Instead, he wrote later: “The motorcycle is mainly a mental phenomenon.
People who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this.”
He added, “A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.”
The literary critic George Steiner, writing in The New Yorker, described the book as “a profound, if somewhat clunky, articulation of the postwar American experience”
and pronounced it worthy of comparison to “Moby-Dick” as an original American work.
