From The Writer’s Alamanac with Garrison Keillor:
It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Robert Coover, (books by this author) born in Charles City, Iowa (1932). As a boy, he moved with his family to a mining town in rural Illinois, where his father ran the local newspaper. His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), is about the lone survivor of a mining accident who goes on to start a religious cult. In response to the question “Why do you write?” he once said, “Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.” And, “Because art’s lie is preferable, in truth, to life’s beautiful terror.” He has gone on to write many experimental novels, including The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968), The Public Burning (1977), and A Child Again (2005).
