SOURCE: Frick, Daniel E. “The Prison House of Art: Aesthetics vs. Politics in Robert Coover's Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 2 (spring 1994): 217–23.

In the following essay, Frick offers a critical reevaluation of Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, which he considers an underappreciated achievement that offers important insight into the depressing reality faced by contemporary American writers who seek to imbue works of aesthetic excellence with political relevance.

Robert Coover's Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? does not appear on most short lists of the important works of contemporary fiction. In fact, it is not likely to be named as one of Coover's major efforts. But it should be. Instead, Gloomy Gus has been twice dismissed as an undistinguished performance. The short story version, published in 1975 in American Review, was seen as a writer's...