Literary Arts

Robert Coover, a far-seeing luminary in the world of writing and its futures, passed away on Saturday, 5 October 2024. He had moved to a Care Village in the United Kingdom near some family members’ homes. Bob, Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts – often referred to affectionately as “Coover” by many of us, including his wife, Pilar – first came to teach at Brown in 1978 and retired as TB Stowell Adjunct Professor – without tenure, still technically and exceptionally an adjunct – in 2012. He preferred to maintain a certain distance from the university’s administrative strictures. His first commitment was to writing and, famously, he worked at it exclusively almost every day, through the latest and earliest hours of the night, retiring before dawn to sleep, and emerging back to this less-real world around noon. Nonetheless, Bob was crucial to the establishment of Brown’s Program in Literary Arts, with its high reputation, devoting much of his enormous energy to his students, his colleagues, his teaching, and to spectacular events at Brown, bringing world-class writers and artists, many of them his friends and peers, to share their work and experience with the Brown and Providence community.

Bob was the author of over twenty books. His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, won the William Faulkner award in 1966. His last – recently excerpted in the magazine Conjunctions with which he was closely associated – is still to be published. Huck Out West appeared in 2017, and a collected stories, Going for a Beer in 2018. Bob’s short fiction was remarkable, with numerous appearances in the New Yorker and other major venues. The collection Pricksongs and Descants (1969) – winner of the 2006 Clifton Fadiman award – laid down a literary marker for postmodernism. His other awards and grants were numerous, including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, an NEA fellowship, a DAAD fellowship in Berlin, a Lannan Foundation fellowship; along with Brandeis University Creative Arts, the Rhode Island Governor’s Arts, and Pell awards. In 1987 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With Brown’s then-President, Vartan Gregorian, he founded the Freedom to Write Program in 1989, initially bringing to campus Chinese dissidents whose lives were in danger following the Tiananmen Square tragedy. The program was eventually transformed into the International Writers Project. 

Bob – who signed the 1968 ‘Writers and Editors War Tax Protest,’ vowing to withhold tax that funded the Vietnam War – was National Book Award shortlisted for one of his best-known and most spectacular literary performances in a kind of contemporary magic realism, The Public Burning (1977). With searing, fantastical caricatures of living figures, the Burning dealt with events surrounding the case and trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Bob was famous as a relentlessly experimental fabulist, exploiting myth, fairy tale, legend, and ancient story-telling within formally complex prose structures, but he was also a socially engaged and rooted writer, one who was deeply concerned with human relations and community, variously bound by religion and its cults as the Brunist books reveal – his debut novel's monumental sequel, The Brunists’ Day of Wrath, came out in 2014.

Bob was born in Charles City, Iowa and got his BA in Slavic Studies from Indiana University. He served in the Navy from 1953 to 1957 and then went on to get an MA from the University of Chicago in 1965. He met his wife, Pilar Coover, née Sans, who was Catalan, during his time in the Navy, while port-hopping in the Mediterranean. They retained strong attachments to Spain and Catalan Culture, Bob most ardently through his love of soccer, as a supporter of Barcelona, and his interest in Spanish wines of the region (his wine cellar and wine tasting parties were legendary.)  Bob was also, famously, a Red Sox fan, with his The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) being a favorite amongst many of his own literary fans. It’s not just a baseball book.

Bob lived in the United Kingdom for a time (there, he was an avid supporter of ‘QPR,’ Queens Park Rangers), and then returned to the United States, teaching, during the late 1960s, at the University of Iowa before coming to Brown in 1978, where he was brought to join the faculty by novelist John Hawkes. Along with Hawkes, he helped to strengthen the Creative Writing program of Brown’s English Department until it broke away as a separate, decidedly fine arts, program in 2003, and eventually became a full department in 2010. Bob’s commitment to experimental practice and aesthetic values: first, professionalism: second, never faltered. He was not railroaded by any fiction/poetry genre divides. He supported the hiring of faculty who shared these inclinations, and helped to bring wide-ranging visitors to Literary Arts, culminating, one might say, with Robert Creeley’s presence, from 2004 to 2005. Bob introduced other major literary figures to Brown for shorter stays, often as a function of his extraordinary skill at curating events and enlisting student and colleague support for such undertakings. As the respected peer and friend of writers like Donald Barthelme, T.C. Boyle, John Barth, Edwidge Danticat, Nuruddin Farah, Williams Gaddis and Gass, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and many others, he could 'make things happen,' having begun a five-part series of 'Unspeakable Practices’ conferences in 1988. These live in the memories of many.*

Bob was also an innovator in bringing together writing and once-new computational media. He believed that writing and other forms of literary practice would be changed by programmable devices, by new audiovisual media, and later, by the network. He studied and appreciated hypertext before it built the World Wide Web, and with Brown colleagues, Andy van Dam and the late George Landow, he worked to bring differently-mediated writing practices into the university, initially betting that hypertext would transform long form fiction. He co-founded the Electronic Literary Organization in 1999 and its Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature was named for him in 2014. In the 1990s he taught courses in hypermedia with Professor Landow, and with Professor van Dam’s support he created the first ever course in writing for immersive VR, Cave Writing, now renamed Writing3D. He also engineered the hiring of John Cayley in 2007 to continue in this vein, eventually under the rubric Digital Language Art, and supporting practices integral to Literary Arts' Digital and Cross-Disciplinary offerings. No one could have foreseen – and we still cannot know – where all this is going now that computer gaming provides more writers with work than, perhaps, any other cultural practice, and now that the Large Language Models are writing with (or against) us. Bob penned his controversial New York Times op-ed “The End of Books” in 1992 but later qualified his argument by noting that the novel, very much his form, took four hundred years to come to its material cultural maturity. Writing with computation may have many years to run before it finds its feet.

Over the years, at Brown in particular, Bob had many devoted students both undergraduate and graduate. And a goodly number of these have gone on to become important literary figures. One hesitates to give a list of names since there will inevitably be those whom I have forgotten but whom I trust to forgive me for doing so. Jeffrey Eugenides, Alexandra Kleeman, Sam Lipsyte, and Rick Moody encountered Bob as undergraduates along with Mary-Kim Arnold, who worked in hypertext with Bob, then later also in more conventional, if still innovative, literary forms. Graduates from the MFA program who studied with Bob include Shelley Jackson, Edwidge Danticat, Ben Marcus and Thalia Field. Many figures prominent in the ‘smaller' world of digital literature worked with Bob: Judd Morrissey, Talan Memmott, Daniel Howe, Bob Arellano and Samantha Gorman, the latter set to be a major figure in writing and production for Augmented Reality. HIs support for these writers will be an important part of Bob’s legacy. I think it is important say – I can do this as a matter of personal experience and friendship – that Bob was somebody who was able to convey his strong sense of the worth and value of what you, his student or friend, was undertaking while not necessarily himself being willing to take some part or even to agree with the impetus of your project. And you didn’t have to agree with him, or try to emulate the particular manners of literary art at which he excelled. Bob supported you in doing something new. Knowing that he believed that your project was worthwhile made new things possible. His was the true appreciation and generosity of an artist.

Bob is survived by his wife of 65 years, the virtuoso classic guitarist and tapestry artist, Pilar Sans Coover, and their children Sara Caldwell, Rod Coover, and Diana Hancox, along with seven grandchildren, three great-granddaughters, and a great-grandson due this month, soon to be named for him.

Together with Bob’s family, we are planning a Providence memorial for Coover in spring 2025.

— John Cayley**

*Although not in mine, sadly. I came later.

** With some much-appreciated help from others, including local Coover-scholar, Elizabeth Bell.

Selected Books

• The Origin of the Brunists, Putnam, New York, 1966. Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York.
• The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Random House, NY, 1968.  Current paperback edition: New American Library, New York.
• Pricksongs & Descants (short fictions), E.P.Dutton, New York, 1969. Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York.
• A Theological Position (plays), E.P. Dutton, New York, 1972.  
• The Public Burning, Viking, New York, 1977. Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York. Introduction: William Gass.  
• A Political Fable (The Cat in the Hat for President), Viking, New York, 1980.
• Spanking the Maid, Grove Press, New York, 1982.  Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York.
• Gerald’s Party, Simon & Schuster (Linden Press), New York, 1986.  Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York.  
• A Night at the Movies (short fictions), Simon & Schuster (Linden), New York, 1987.  Current paperback edition: Dalkey Archive, Normal IL.  
• Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, Simon & Schuster (Linden), New York, 1987.  
• Pinocchio in Venice, Simon & Schuster (Linden), New York, 1991. Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York.  
• John’s Wife, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996. Current paperback edition: Scribner, New York.Briar Rose, Grove-Atlantic, New York, 1997. Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York. 
• Ghost Town, Henry Holt, New York, 1998. Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York.  
• The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut, Grove-Atlantic, New York, 2002. . Current paperback edition: Grove-Atlantic, New York.  
• Stepmother, McSweeney’s Books, San Francisco, 2004.  
• A Child Again (short fictions), McSweeney’s Books, San Francisco, 2005.  
• The Brunist Day of Wrath, Dzank Books, April, 2014.