Robert Coover

Robert Lowell Coover is an American author and professor emeritus in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, won the 1966 William Faulkner Award, and tells of the sole survivor of a mine disaster who 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 Phantom, who represents international Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon to find what is really going on amidst the welter of narratives.