McCaffery is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, originally published in slightly different form in 1979, he examines Coover's portrayal of the human tendency to manufacture myths in The Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning.

In the following essay, Estes examines Robert Coover's use of folk styles, particularly an unsentimental type of humor, in The Public Burning.

In the following essay, Walsh examines Coover's reinterpretation of the Rosenberg trial and McCarthy-era hysteria in The Public Burning, arguing that the novel's carnivalesque satire—particularly as embodied in the Nixon and Uncle Sam characters—dramatizes the collective psychology of Cold War American society.

In the following essay, Cioffi explores the problematic representation of real and fictive worlds in The Public Burning, particularly as evident in the character of Richard Nixon, whose fictional persona in the novel subverts his actual historical identity, thus unsettling the reader's assumptions about American history and fiction itself.

In the following interview, Coover discusses the cultural impact of the Rosenberg trial and the creative process behind his writing of The Public Burning, as well as the potential of hypertext literature and the significance of film, dreams, and literary theory in his work.

In the following essay, Cornis-Pope discusses Coover's evocation of “otherness” and marginality in The Public Burning, especially as portrayed through the novel's composite voices and Nixon's interactions with the tyrannical Uncle Sam character and the scapegoated Ethel Rosenberg.

In the following essay, Frick explores Coover's preoccupation with Richard Nixon, as evidenced in The Public Burning. Frick contends that Nixon represents an authorial alter-ego through whom Coover examines his own artistic self-doubt and depravity and the perils of attempting to debunk a tyrannical national mythology through the force of one's literary imagination.

In the following review, Quinn praises the reissued edition of The Public Burning and offers a positive assessment of Ghost Town.

One thing [the sodomy episode in The Public Burning] brings out is how boringly enthralled and confused [Coover] is by sex, like many contemporary American novelists. This fantasy of anal sex is not nearly as good as the immediately preceding episode, a surrealistically transformed version of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The book should have ended here, especially as this is the "public burning" of the title. But Robert Coover evidently has a Mailer-like view of sodomy as somet...

Richard Nixon's inward ruminations in [The Public Burning] offer a view of the then Vice President's adolescence, college experience, early years, and sex life that's wholly engrossing. At one level the constructive imagination illuminates neglected relationships among the facts of a private and public life…. And simultaneously there's a dramatization, at another level, of the processes involved in the creation of a literary character…. But for every page of percept...

Coover is an ambitious and gifted writer who has made the mistake of treating a distressing and important subject in a kind of surrealistic razzamatazz which rapidly becomes confusing and unreadable. [In The Public Burning] the Rosenbergs become part of a collective nightmare which blurs and dissolves like a crazy documentary…. His attempt to understand Nixon fails because he substitutes random sensations and swirling reminiscences for hard-headed analysis of a vulgar but fascinating political person...