Robert Coover

Ghost Town, published in 1998, is another perfect example. The book is a send-up of the traditional genré of the Western film, with a hero named Nobody and action that plays out in ghost towns in the "middle of nowhere."

Coover’s novel The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Raw Footage -- a wild and weird tale of a city where everything revolves around sex -- was the result of almost a quarter-century of work and is also no exception to the author's style. Lucky Pierre is nothing less than a phallic adventure, with a protagonist with an unbuttoned fly who moves from one pornographic interlude to another in a fictitious city called Cinecity. The book is written to feel like a cheap porno film, offering the reader "reels" instead of chapters. After a string of accidents, Pierre starts to believe that his life has become part of a scripted film and that his fate -- as dictated in the script -- won't be kind to him. He desperately seeks a way out.

But sex isn't the only area where Coover is intent on pushing buttons. The narrator of his intensely political tome The Public Burning raised eyebrows because a young Richard Nixon serves as the tale's narrator.

Despite being so prolific and having covered such diverse range of genrés, Coover does not align himself with any real literary circle. "I have close friends many of whom are writers … but I’ve never belonged to any particular literary circle or movement," he wrote once.

An American Europhile

Coover may have grown up in the American Midwest, but he didn’t stay. His work is to a greater or lesser degree inclined by European sensibilities.

"Europe is my study," he wrote in an essay titled "My Europe" in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung." "I’ve spent almost half of my adult life here, primarily in Spain and England, but also in France, Germany and Italy. And I can say, without exaggeration, that about 90 percent of what I’ve written has arisen here."

But today Coover lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he keeps a day job as English professor at the prestigious Brown University. He's been teaching creative writing there since 1980 as a way to supplement his income as a writer.

There, his new passion is teaching students to write non-linear, non-sequential fiction using the Internet markup language hypertext -- a technology he has spent the past decade studying.

"I must confess (. . .) that I am not myself an expert navigator of hyperspace, nor am I -- as I enter my seventh decade and thus rather committed for better or worse to the obsolescent print technology -- likely to engage in any hypertext fictions of my own," he wrote in his 1992 paper, "The End of Books."

"But interested in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and the fictions that challenge linearity," Coover wrote. "I felt that something was happening out (or in) there and that I ought to know what it was."

And now, he's helping students explore that world.

Ruth Elkins