Robert Coover

Robert Coover (Charles City, Iowa, 1932 - Warwick, England, 2024) was an American novelist, short story writer and university teacher. He is generally regarded as a writer of fabulation and metafiction, and later in life he became one of the advocates of electronic literature. His career linked literary experiment with a wide range of academic and public activities.

He studied Slavic Studies at Indiana University, graduating in 1953, and that same year joined the United States Navy, where he rose to lieutenant before leaving in 1957. He later earned a master's degree in General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in 1965. In 1968 he signed a pledge to refuse tax payments as a protest against the Vietnam War. He taught and worked as a writer in residence at many universities, and he taught at Brown University from 1981 to 2012.

His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, follows the lone survivor of a mine disaster who starts a religious cult. His best-known book, The Public Burning, retells the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg through a mix of tall tales and fantastic figures, with Richard Nixon placed at the centre of alternate chapters. His fiction plays with narrative conventions, rewrites myths and familiar stories, and combines humour, sex and formal invention.

His legacy is closely tied to electronic literature. In 1992 he published the essay "The End of Books" in The New York Times, which brought the debate about hypertext to a broad readership. He co-founded the Electronic Literature Organization and helped establish a graduate programme in digital language arts at Brown. He died in 2024, aged 92, in a care home in Warwick.