Robert Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale, received his B.A. in Slavic Studies from Indiana University in 1955, then served in the United States Navy. He received an M.A. in General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 1965. Coover has served as a teacher or writer in residence at many universities.
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 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 Shadow who represents International Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon (in a surprisingly human and sympathetic portrayal) to find what is really going on amidst the welter of narratives.
A later novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears offers an alternate Nixon, one who devoted to football and sex 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.
Coover is one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization.
