Robert Coover, who has died aged 92, was one of the pioneers of postmodern writing as it developed in the US in the 1960s, alongside writers such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, John Hawkes and Donald Barthelme. This was before postmodernism acquired its current political and structural connotations, a time Hari Kunzru described, in a 2011 Guardian profile of Coover, as a “fantastical funhouse of narrative possibilities”.
Coover recounted his frustration with Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, and what was called realism. “It wasn’t realistic. He was using modes of response to the world that had become stultified.” He later explained: “I learned my realism from guys like Franz Kafka.”
