Pirsig, Robert M., 1928-2017

His Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, 1983: CIP t.p. (Robert Pirsig)
LC data base, 11-15-83 (hdg.: Pirsig, Robert M.)
Wikipedia, viewed June 13, 2011 (Robert Maynard Pirsig; b. Sept. 6, 1928; American writer and philosopher)
New York times WWW site, viewed Apr. 25, 2017 (in obituary published Apr. 24: Robert M. Pirsig; b. Robert Maynard Pirsig, Sept. 6, 1928, Minneapolis; d. Monday [Apr. 24, 2017], South Berwick, Me., aged 88; his 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)

Robert M. Pirsig’s 1966 Honda Super Hawk motorcycle was given by Wendy K. Pirsig, Robert M. Pirsig's second wife, to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2019.

In 1958, he became a professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, and taught creative writing courses for two years. Shortly thereafter he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Pirsig's published writing consists most notably of two books. The better known, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, develops around Pirsig's exploration into the nature of quality. Ostensibly a first-person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris had taken from Minneapolis to San Francisco, it is an exploration of the underlying metaphysics of Western culture. He also gives the reader a short summary of the history of philosophy, including his interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle as part of an ongoing dispute between universalists, admitting the existence of universals, and the Sophists, opposed by Socrates and his student Plato. Pirsig finds in "Quality" a special significance and common ground between Western and Eastern world views.

Pirsig had great difficulty finding a publisher for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig was turned down by 121 publishers, before publisher #122 accepted the manuscript. When he did, his publisher's internal recommendation stated, "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature." In his book review, George Steiner compared Pirsig's writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust, and Bergson, stating that "the assertion itself is valid ... the analogies with Moby-Dick are patent".

In 1974, Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow him to write a follow-up, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), in which he developed a value-based metaphysics, Metaphysics of Quality, that challenges our subject–object view of reality. The second book, this time "the captain" of a sailboat, follows on from where Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance left off.

Pirsig was vice-president of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center from 1973 to 1975 and also served on the board of directors.