SOURCE: Frick, Daniel E. “Coover's Secret Sharer? Richard Nixon in The Public Burning.” Critique 37, no. 2 (winter 1996): 82–91.

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.

What lies behind Robert Coover's fascination with Richard Nixon? The novelist himself gave this explanation to Larry McCaffery in a 1979 interview: “[A]ny exploration of Nixon, this man who has played such a large role in American society since World War II, would have to reveal something about us all” (59). In an effort to uncover the nature of that revelation, most scholarship on The Public Burning treats the former president as a figure who offers us a perspective on...