Robert Anton Wilson is perhaps best known for his books Cosmic Trigger and The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a science-fiction series about a secret global society, which he wrote with his friend Robert Shea in the late 1960s, when they were both editors at Playboy.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote many books on a wide range of subjects such as extrasensory perception, telepathy, metaphysics, the paranormal, conspiracy theories, sex, drugs and what he termed quantum psychology.
Mark Frauenfelder, a co-editor of boingboing.net, a pop culture website that began life as a print magazine in the 1980s and for which Robert Anton Wilson contributed many articles, speaking about the Illuminatus! Trilogy said: "In part because it dealt with conspiracies in a science-fiction way, the trilogy achieved a cult following among science fiction readers, hippies, the psychedelic crowd."
Cosmic Trigger is a strange autobiography in which Robert Anton Wilson describes experiences he had had when he believed he was in communication with extraterrestrials and admitted that he had been experimenting with peyote and mescaline at the time.
Robert Anton Wilson had a large dose of humour in his work and he maintained that people should never rule out any possibility, including that lasagna might fly.
On Jan. 6, in his last post on his blog, he wrote: "I don't see how to take death seriously. I look forward without dogmatic optimism, but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying."
Born in Brooklyn 1932, Robert Anton Wilson attended Brooklyn Polytechnical College and New York University.
As well as his daughter Christina Pearson, another daughter and a son survive Robert Anton Wilson. However, Arlen Riley Wilson, his wife for 39 years, and who was also a writer and poet, died in 1999.
