Robert Coover facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Robert Coover
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Coover in 2009
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| Born | February 4, 1932 Charles City, Iowa, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Education | Southern Illinois University Carbondale Indiana University Bloomington (BA) University of Chicago (MA) |
| Period | 1960s–present |
| Genre | Short story, novel |
| Spouse | Maria Pilar Sans i Mallafré (1959–present) |
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Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is 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.
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 has served as a teacher or writer in residence at many universities. He taught at Brown University from 1981 to 2012.
Coover's wife is the noted needlepoint artist Pilar Sans Coover. They have three children, including Sara Caldwell.
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 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."
In 1987 Coover was the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2021, Coover, in a collaboration with Art Spiegelman, released Street Cop with Isolarii.
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: "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer"
Coover established the MFA 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.
Awards and honors
- 1967 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel for The Origin of the Brunists
- 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story
William Faulkner, Brandeis University, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment of the Arts, Rea Lifetime Short Story, Rhode Island Governor's Arts, Pell, and Clifton Fadiman Awards, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Lannan Foundation, and DAAD fellowships
See also
In Spanish: Robert Coover para niños
- List of electronic literature authors, critics, and works
- Digital poetry
- E-book#History
- Electronic literature
- Hypertext fiction
- Interactive fiction
- Literatronica
