Robert coover biography

Robert Coover, a far-seeing luminary in the world of writing and its futures, passed away on Saturday, 5 October 2024. He had moved to a Care Village in the United Kingdom near some family members’ homes. Bob, Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts – often referred to affectionately as “Coover” by many of us, including his wife, Pilar – first came to teach at Brown in 1978 and retired as TB Stowell Adjunct Professor – without tenure, still technically and exceptionally an adjunct – in 2012. He preferred to maintain a certain distance from the university’s administrative strictures. His first commitment was to writing and, famously, he worked at it exclusively almost every day, through the latest and earliest hours of the night, retiring before dawn to sleep, and emerging back to this less-real world around noon. Nonetheless, Bob was crucial to the establishment of Brown’s Program in Literary Arts, with its high reputation, devoting much of his enormous energy to his students, his colleagues, his teaching, and to spectacular events at Brown, bringing world-class writers and artists, many of them his friends and peers, to share their work and experience with the Brown and Providence community.

Bob was the author of over twenty books. His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, won the William Faulkner award in 1966. His last – recently excerpted in the magazine Conjunctions with which he was closely associated – is still to be published. Huck Out West appeared in 2017, and a collected stories, Going for a Beer in 2018. Bob’s short fiction was remarkable, with numerous appearances in the New Yorker and other major venues. The collection Pricksongs and Descants (1969) – winner of the 2006 Clifton Fadiman award – laid down a literary marker for postmodernism. His other awards and grants were numerous, including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, an NEA fellowship, a DAAD fellowship in Berlin, a Lan

Biography

Pomo has probably gone the way of those others -isms. You know – minimalism, structuralism, deconstructionism, communism, all of those. It has left a few bodies behind and maybe a few worthwhile writers. Coover is one of the worthwhile ones and he is still turning out good, pomo books, while the others are dead or turning out work of dubious quality. So let’s hear it for post-modernism and Robert Coover. Oh, and the books are listed to the right and they are pretty well all worth reading, while The Public Burning may be one of the best US late 20th century and pomo novels ever.

Robert Coover was born in Iowa City in 1932. His father was a newspaper editor but had to move around a lot. After studying two years at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, he read Slavic studies at Indiana University and then joined the navy. After the navy, he stayed abroad, marrying a Spanish woman. This led to rumours that he had been working for the CIA. He was apparently also friends with the very elusive Thomas Pynchon. On returning to the USA, he took an M.A. at the University of Chicago. He has taught at various educational institutions but remains best known as one of the leading post-modernist authors. It was the critic Robert Scholes, in his seminal book, The Fabulators, who placed Coover firmly in the category of fabulator, i.e. writers whose writing is akin to magic realism but whose characters are aware of their fictionality (what a horrible word and not even recognised by my spell-check) and who consciously create and examine myths. He died in 2024.

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Robert Coover
Robert Coover
Featured Author: Robert Coover
Interview
Interview
Interview
Going For A Beer (story by Coover)
The End of Books (article by Coover)

Biography

Robert Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University, Indiana University and the University of Chicago. He has taught at several universities and currently teaches electronic and experimental writing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Coover has written novels, plays, essays and film scripts as well as short stories.  His short story collections include A Night at the Movies, 1987, and Pricksongs and Descants 1969. Several of his stories have been adapted into plays and films, including The Babysitter and Spanking the Maid.

His awards include the William Faulkner Award, Best First Novel, 1966 The Origin ofthe Brunists, fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was given three Obie awards for the American Place Theater production of The Kid (1972-73), and a National Book Award Nomination for The Public Burning.

By mixing reality with illusion, Coover creates another, alternative world. “Amazing,” “fantastic,” and magic” are among the adjectives used to describe his work.  “Experimentalist” is a term often applied to his writing by critics. In an interview in Publisher’s Weekly, he commented, “Most of what we call experimental actually has been precisely traditional in the sense that it’s gone back to old forms to find its new form – to folk tale, to pre-Cervantian, pre-novelistic narrative possibilities.”

Biographical information prepared the year of the award.

American novelist (1932–2024)

This article is about the American novelist. For other people named Coover, see 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 and 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 i