Robert Coover is one of America's most distinguished writers. His eminence is to be measured not by the size of his current readership, which remains select, but in terms of the technical resourcefulness that has enabled him to produce a series of virtuosic works in a dazzling array of styles and forms. Coover is a consummate artist who has invested immense literary labor in the production of work of enduring quality.

His creative energy is assiduously directed. Most of his writing has been done away from the United States, and his custom has been to work mainly in the early hours of the morning. Writing in New Times in 1977, Geoffrey Woolf remarked: "More than any writer, more than any man I have met, he is invincibly self-assured and secure in his professional self-esteem. This he expresses not through stridency or arrogance but through a relentlessness of purpose; he...