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.[9]
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.[10]
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."[11]
Coover's 1982 novellaSpanking the Maid remained one of his favorites; asked in an interview "Which of your books will get you into heaven?", Coover quipped, "Spanking the Maid. God's deep into S&M."[12] A later novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears (1987), offers an alternate Nixon, one who is devoted to football and sex with 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.[13]
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.[16] In 1992 he published the essay "The End of Books" in The New York Times,[17] making a mainstream audience aware of the new genre for perhaps the first time. The "now infamous" essay[18] "roiled the literary scene and declaimed the imminent demise of the novel".[19] 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.[20] In 1993, Coover published a second New York Times essay on electronic literature titled "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer".[21]
^Stengel, Wayne B. (2001). "Robert Coover". In Fallon, Erin; Feddersen, R.C.; Kurtzleben, James; Lee, Maurice A.; Rochette-Crawley, Susan (eds.). A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English. Routledge. pp. 118–32. ISBN1-57958-353-9.
^Moor, Robert (July 2014). "Strange Loop". Harper's Magazine. Archived from the original on July 29, 2021. Retrieved July 29, 2021.
^Zdunkiewicz, Lech (2018). "A Contextualization of Robert Coover's "The Babysitter"". Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw (8): 59–77.
^Edwards, Thomas R. (August 14, 1977). "Real People, Mythic History". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 29, 2021. Retrieved July 29, 2021.
Rettberg, Scott (September 19, 2008). "A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover on Vimeo". Vimeo.com. Retrieved August 19, 2011.– Novelist Robert Coover's keynote address at the Electronic Literature in Europe seminar (elitineurope.net), September 13, 2008. Introduced by Scott Rettberg. Videography by Martin Arvebro.
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