Philosophical novel writer Robert M Pirsig, aged 88

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, has died at the age of 88.

Pirsig’s publishing house, William Morrow, announced that he died at his home in South Berwick, Maine. He had been in failing health.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1974 and was based on a motorcycle trip Pirsig took in the late 1960s with his 12-year-old son, Chris.

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”.

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.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance ideally suited a generation’s yearning for the open road, quest for knowledge and scepticism of modern values, while also telling a personal story about a father and son relationship and the author’s struggles with schizophrenia.

A native of Minneapolis, Pirsig was a prodigy who at age nine scored 170 on an IQ test and six years later graduated from high school. Army service in Korea at the end of the Second World War exposed him to Eastern thought and culture and profoundly influenced him.

He is survived by his wife Wendy, a son and daughter.

Author Robert M Pirsig.