Robert Coover

Robert Lowell Coover (February 4, 1932 – October 5, 2024) was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Background Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale, received his B.A. in Slavic Studies from Indiana University Bloomington in 1953, then served in the United States Navy from 1953 to 1957, where he became a lieutenant. He received an M.A. in General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 1965. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Coover served as a teacher or writer in residence at many universities. He taught at Brown University from 1981 to 2012.

Literary career Coover's first novel was The Origin of the Brunists, in which the sole survivor of a mine disaster starts a religious cult. His second book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., deals with the role of the creator. The eponymous Waugh, a shy, lonely accountant, creates a baseball game in which rolls of the dice determine every play, and dreams up players to attach those results to.

Coover's 1969 short story collection Pricksongs & Descants contains the celebrated metafictional story "The Babysitter," which was adapted into the 1995 movie of the same title, directed by Guy Ferland.

Coover's best-known work, The Public Burning, deals with the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in terms that have been called magic realism. Half of the book is devoted to the mythic hero Uncle Sam of tall tales, dealing with the equally fantastic Phantom, who represents international Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon to stage the execution of the Rosenbergs as a public event in Times Square. As reviewer Thomas R. Edwards wrote in The New York Times, "Astonishingly, Nixon is the most interesting and sympathetic character in the story."

Coover's 1982 novella Spanking the Maid remained one of his favorites; asked in an interview "Which of your books will get you into heaven?", Coover quipped, "Spanking the Maid. God's deep into S&M." A later novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears (1987), offers an alternate Nixon, one who is devoted to football and sex with the same doggedness with which he pursued political success in this reality. The theme anthology A Night at the Movies includes the story "You Must Remember This", a piece about Casablanca that features an explicit description of what Rick and Ilsa did when the camera wasn't on them. Pinocchio in Venice returns to mythical themes. In 2014, he published a lengthy sequel to his first novel, The Brunist Day of Wrath.

In 1987 he was the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2021, Coover, in a collaboration with Art Spiegelman, released Street Cop.

Electronic literature

Coover was a supporter of early electronic literature, and was one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization. He taught electronic literature at Brown University and organized events such as the Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature (TP21CL), held at Brown in 1999. In 1992 he published the essay "The End of Books" in The New York Times, making a mainstream audience aware of the new genre for perhaps the first time. The "now infamous" essay "roiled the literary scene and declaimed the imminent demise of the novel". Many scholars of electronic literature reference the essay, for instance J. Yellowlees Douglas in the title of her book, The End of Books–Or Books Without End? Reading Interactive Narratives. In 1993, Coover published a second New York Times essay on electronic literature titled "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer".

Coover established the Master of Fine Arts program in Digital Language Arts at Brown University, and helped bring a string of writers of electronic literature to the university, including John Cayley, Talan Memmott, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, William Gillespie, and Samantha Gorman. Talan Memmott was Brown University's first graduate fellow of electronic writing.

Personal life and death Coover's wife was the noted needlepoint artist Pilar Sans Coover. They had three children, including Sara Caldwell.

Coover died at a care home in Warwick, England, on October 5, 2024, at the age of 92.