THE AUTHOR
Robert Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa, on February 4, 1932. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale and received his B.A. from Indiana University Bloomington in 1953 before being drafted to serve 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.
To get a feel for the type of writing Robert Coover creates, you have only to check out the kind of people he respects. One of them is controversial Chicago philosophy professor Richard McKeon who, to many, was an academic bully in all its dominant glory, a view that another writer, Robert Pirsig, immortalized in his wildly popular 1974 autobiographical novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In Pirsig’s book, the author allegedly bases his Chairman on McKeon, who browbeats students half to death "with a gleam in his eye" while graduating "only carbon copies of himself."
Yet, Coover’s admiration for McKeown hardly reflects Pirsig’s portrayal. To Coover, McKeon inspires admiration rather than disdain, so much so that he "respectfully" dedicated his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, to McKeown.
Not surprisingly, controversy has surrounded this Midwestern writer nearly from the start. After living in Iowa, Coover moved with his family to Herrin, a rural mining town in downstate Illinois, where his father was managing editor of the Herrin Daily Journal. Following in his father’s footsteps, Coover edited and wrote for several high school papers under the pen name of “Scoop.” In 1949 he enrolled in Southern Illinois University, transferring to Indiana University two years later.
When he was nineteen, Coover had just come home from college on holiday break when he learned that a mining accident had killed a number of workers. His father enlisted the son’s help in covering the story, and, as the young man rummaged through the debris, he was shocked at the number of dead and disfigured bodies, many of which were unidentifiable.
Later, Coover had a revelation. "I began to wonder what might happen if some guy did get rescued, and came up thinking he'd been saved for some divine mission. What might that lead to?"
Coover went on to earn his bachelor's degree in 1953 with a major in Slavonic languages. But, he couldn’t get the mine incident out of his head. Eventually, it led to what became the backbone of his first short story and most controversial novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966) about the lone survivor of a mining accident who goes on to found and then oversee the disintegration of a religious cult.
After that, Coover produced several more experimental novels, including The Universal Baseball Association (1968), The Public Burning (1977), and Spanking the Maid (1981). His first few books were so divergent from any single style that he had difficulty retaining a single publisher. Finally, his lucky thirteenth book, Gerald's Party (1986), was picked up by an imprint of Simon and Schuster. It was the first of his novels to have been published without having first been rejected at least once.
Coover, who has been attacked for some of his more outrageous and controversial novels, once admitted, "A recent review of one of my books described my work as some sort of terrorist mission—and yet I like ... to be controversial in that way. It's proof I'm alive."
Writing of one of his novellas, Stepmother (2004), a fanciful reimagination of Cinderella, one reviewer claimed Coover, the "father of modern American experimental fiction, returns with ... a masterful re-imagining of the fairy-tale tradition. There is magic, there are princes, and painful castrations. Also, there is beauty and true love, of a sort."
In his work, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968), the protagonist creates an imaginary baseball league in which the players command their own destinies. Written from the POV of president Richard Nixon, it was a satire (like most of his works) of the early 1950s. Coover called another novel, The Public Burning (1976), a “factional account” of the trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Some of his lesser known works include Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (1987), again centered around Nixon, whom he created as a simpleminded and lust-filled football player during the 1930s; Pinocchio in Venice (1991); John’s Wife (1996); Ghost Town (1998); The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut (2002) about a popular porn-film actor living in a time of boundless sexual lasciviousness; and Noir (2010), a metafictional visit back to the hard-boiled detective story. He also revisisted The Origin of the Brunists in his sequel, The Brunist Day of Wrath (2014).
Coover, who spent much of his time writing and teaching at Brown University, once said, "The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it."
In his last novel, Huck Out West (2017), the author continues his masterful, mash-up approach to literature in a story revolving around the lives of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn during and after the American Civil War. The novel is one of several to imagine Huck's life after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
THE ETHICIST
In many ways, the born-again childhood of author Robert Coover explains his preoccupation and fascination with whimsy and the American Dream. An acknowledged writer of avant-garde fiction, plays, poetry, and essays whose experimental forms and techniques mix reality with fantasy, his results are often a surreal, Dali-esque canvas of Never-Never Land meets Eneyclopedia Britannica.
While still in college, Coover edited student papers. The day he was graduated, he received his draft notice and went on to serve in the U.S. Naval Reserve during the Korean War, achieving the rank of lieutenant. Upon his 1957 discharge, he devoted himself to the study and writing of fiction. During that summer, he spent a month sequestered in a cabin near the Canadian border, where he buried himself in the work of absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett while writing serious avant-garde fiction.
In 1958, Coover travelled to Spain, where he reunited with Maria del Pilar Sans-Mallafré, a woman whom he had met while serving a military tour. The couple married the following year, spending that summer touring the continent by motorcycle. He later wrote about the experience in One Summer in Spain: Five Poems, his first published work. Coover and his wife lived in Spain for most of the early 1960s, during which time the author began publishing in various literary magazines, including the prestigious Evergreen Review. They returned to the states where Coover attended the University of Chicago, from which he received his master's degree in 1965.
In 1966, Coover took a teaching position at Bard College in New York while publishing his first book, which won the William Faulkner Award for best first novel. In 1968, at the very dawn of his rising literary career, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest of the Vietnam War, which he considered immoral. It was a gigantic step for a former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy—one that required soul searching and introspection. It was not reached easily, but over time, Coover realized that, if the world were ever going to change, it would need to do so gradually and not like a flash from a meteor. He said:
"People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment."
It was a belief he carried with him throughout his entire life as a writer, teacher, and human being.
In 1969, Coover won a Rockefeller Foundation grant and published his first short-fiction collection, Pricksongs and Descants. He also wrote, produced, and directed a movie, On a Confrontation in Iowa City (1969) and remained interested in film throughout his life. During the early 1970s, he published short stories and stage plays, including A Theological Position (1972), a collection of one-act plays, all of which were eventually produced. He also won Guggenheim fellowships in 1971 and 1974 and served as fiction editor for the Iowa Review from 1974 to 1977. While concentrating mostly on short fiction throughout the eighties, he produced a series of new novels the following decade.
He has since served as a teacher or a writer in residence at several universities, including Columbia, Princeton, and Brandeis, and he served as writer-in-residence and a professor of creative writing at Brown University in Providence, RI, from 1979 to 2012.
Coover once reflected upon life:
“We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.” He lent credence to the solidity of his foundation steeped in metaphysical fiction when he acknowledged, “I learned my realism from guys like Kafka.”
Robert Lowell Coover lives with his wife, Pilar Sans Coover, now a noted needlepoint artist. They have three children.
The Author’s Offer: If you’d like a complimentary review copy of one of my latest books, check out my Website at www.djherda.org, as well as my current publisher at Elektra Press. I’ll look forward to hearing your thoughts. Until then, happy reading!