Robert Coover

Coover grew up in small industrial towns across Indiana and Illinois, the son of a newspaper editor, and served in the Navy before studying literature at the University of Chicago and Columbia. His early fiction experimented restlessly with form: The Origin of the Brunists reimagined a mine disaster as the birth of a cult religion, and Pricksongs and Descants rewrote fairy tales as exercises in narrative possibility.

The Public Burning, his most audacious book, staged the real 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a carnival spectacle in Times Square, complete with a fictionalized Richard Nixon as narrator and Uncle Sam as a folkloric American id; fear of libel suits delayed its publication for years. Coover kept pushing formal boundaries afterward, from hypertext fiction to Casino, his late Vegas-set satire.

He taught creative writing for decades at Brown University, mentoring generations of experimental writers and championing electronic literature as an early and vocal advocate, and died in 2024 at ninety-two.