Robert Coover

A Master of Hypertext Fiction

Author Robert Coover says he is committed to "obsolescent print technology," but his fiction reads like a harbinger of novels to come in the era of new technology.

Born in Charles City, Iowa, on Feb. 4, 1932, Robert Coover always thought he would be a journalist. And although his career has been one of words, it has not been as a hack. Coover is widely regarded as one of America’s most influential living writers. He's a prolific one, too, with 15 groundbreaking works of fiction under his belt.

Coover grew up in the Midwest, in small town America. He has described his hometown as a middle-class place that is "white and patriotic," a place where "even Chicago was far-off and exotic."

"I already knew at that time that I would write," he wrote in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung," a German newspaper. "Even if I thought for a long time that it would be as a journalist, like Hemmingway."

It was only natural that Coover would become a hack. His father was the editor of a local newspaper in an Illinois mining town. As a young man, Coover often helped out at the paper's office, while also writing for his school newspaper. He wrote short stories, drew cartoons and even published a newspaper about his own family.

But when it came time for college, Coover abandoned his passion, at least temporarily. While at Indiana State University, he studied Slavic languages before moving on for further studies at Southern Illinois State University and the University of Chicago.

Like so many writers, Coover could be a bit stubborn. He didn't take much interest in enforced learning. "At college I avoided going to creative writing courses and seminars on literature whenever possible," he wrote. "I wanted to read and write at my own speed."

But his talent for writing was recognized straight away. His first novel, The Origin of Brunists won the 1966 William Faulkner Award -- the first of what would be many accolades.

The jury that awarded Coover the 1987 Rea Award wrote: "For taking the dross of the ordinary and spinning it into the treasure of myth, Robert Coover [is] a writer who has managed, willfully and even perversely, to remain his own man while offering his generous vision and versions of America."

Coover has been lauded as an "old school postmodernist." The prestigious New York Times Book Review has called him the "master of hypertext," " a one-man Big Bang of exploding creative force" and attributed to him a "striking gift for language, his ability to create a narrative tone in perfect harmony with the universe of his story." "Time" magazine, meanwhile, has described him "as an avant-gardist who can do with reality what a magician does with a pack of cards: shuffle the familiar into unexpected patterns."

But Coover doesn't care much for the label of literary experimentalist. "Most of what we call experimental actually has been precisely traditional in the sense that it's gone back to old forms to find its new form -- to folk tale, to pre-Cervantian, pre-novelistic narrative possibilities," he once told "Publisher's Weekly."

Coover's usual literary trick is to mix fact and fiction, fusing fantastical illusion with morbid reality to create an alternative world of his own making. He can often be found reworking fairy tales, as in his book Pinnochio in Venice, or playing with fables, as demonstrated in the book Aesop's Forest, which he wrote with Brian Swann.