NEW YORK -- Robert Coover, the exuberant and rule-defying fiction writer and educator who devised new adventures for literature through such works as "The Babysitter" and "The Public Burning" and through his decades on the faculty of Brown University, has died.He was 92.
Coover died surrounded by family on Saturday at a care home in Warwick, England, his daughter Sara Caldwell told The Associated Press on Sunday.Caldwell, an author and filmmaker, said he had been in declining health in recent months.
The writer T.C.Boyle said on X that Coover had been “a friend and mentor to me since I was in my early twenties.
His first collection, ‘Pricksongs and Descants,’ opened up a new world for me.”Coover was often grouped with William Gass, John Barth and other authors of post-modern or "meta-fiction" of the 1960s and '70s.They challenged and sometimes bludgeoned conventional storytelling and grammar, whether through experiments with language, the parody of fairy tales, mysteries and other literary genres or the self-conscious exploration of the writing process.
Coover's trademarks included macabre humor, graphic sex, broad takes on everything from baseball to small towns and an encyclopedic range of cultural references."Robert Coover writes from life, but not the one he has lived out in the world," author Ben Marcus once wrote of him."He writes from his life as a reader of narratives.
His personal experience, which he draws on for his work, is the experience he has had inside of texts.He did not grow up in Iowa, but in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' He did not suffer first love in the mid-west of America, but inside the Greek myths, or Aesop's fables, or 'The Decameron.'"Rarely without something to say, he wrote dozens of novels, stories and plays.
His notable works included "The Babysitter," in which a night out for the parents multiplies into a funhouse of alternative realities; "You Must Remember This," an X-rated imagining of the leads in "Casablanca," and the no...