Coover’s most controversial work was the 1977 novel “The Public Burning,” a warp-speed satire of the 1953 executions of convicted communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg that publishers hesitated to take on for fear of legal action by Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn and other then still-living historical figures who appear in the book. Coover alternated chapters about the Rosenbergs with the thoughts of then-Vice President Nixon, who laments his subservient role in the Eisenhower administration and confides to a growing sexual attraction between himself and Ethel Rosenberg.
“I was Eisenhower’s salesman in the Cloakrooms, that was my job,” Coover’s Nixon explains. “I was the political broker between the patsies and the Neanderthals, I had to cool the barnburners, soften up the hardshells, keep the hunkers and cowboys in line, mollify the soreheads and baby tinhorn egos. I was the flak runner, the wheelhorse, I had to mend the fences and bind up the wounds.”
Coover’s influence was on the page and in the classroom. At Brown, where he was on the faculty from 1981 to 2012, those he taught included Rick Moody and Sam Lipsyte. Coover and such fellow professors as John Hawkes inspired students to experiment and break away from the kind of spare, realistic style — as exemplified by Ernest Hemingway — that was the standard in mainstream American fiction.
For Coover, anything seemed possible. He was an early believer that the written word could be integrated with music and film and digital technology and championed what he called “Cave Writing,” which included placing students in a virtual reality simulator. Before e-books were widely available, he helped found “electronic literature,” storytelling designed specifically for digital devices.
“What I saw quite clearly in the ‘80s, before the internet, was that the whole world was shifting toward digital formats, and that it didn’t matter whether it’s movies or writing or whatever,” he told The Believer in 2015. “It was something that was coming.”
His honors included the William Faulkner Award for best debut fiction, given for his 1966 book “The Origin of the Brunists.” He also received the Rea Award for excellence in short story writing and the Clifton Fadiman Medal for fiction writers deserving of more recognition. The American Academy of Arts and Letters voted him in as a member and even had a prize named for him, the Robert Coover Award for an outstanding work of electronic literature.
Coover is survived by Pilar Sans Coover, the tapestry artist he married in 1959, along with the couple’s three children: Caldwell, Roderick Coover and Diana Hancox, who lived near their parents’ care home in England. Caldwell said he had seven grandchildren, three great-granddaughters, and a great-grandson due this month who is set to be named after him.
Born in Charles City, Iowa, he graduated from Indiana University in 1953, served in the Navy and wrote for the Evergreen Review and other publications before completing his first novel. He would recall a night in Chicago in 1960 as an epiphany, when he was reading Saul Bellow’s prize-winning “The Adventures of Augie March” and William Gaddis’ experimental classic “The Recognitions.”
“I really loved ‘Augie March.’ The opening section, at least. But somewhere in the middle of the book the experience totally transformed, I was really ticked off. It was bad and getting worse. And I was really catching on to ‘The Recognitions.’ I took ‘Augie March’ and threw it across the room, and that was the last I saw of it,” he told The Guardian in 2011.
“I didn’t think of it as realistic. It used modes of response to the world that had become stultified and so were easily communicated. I learned my realism from guys like Kafka.”