Let her rip

So, I found my first cool nugget in the process of looking up stuff about Robert Coover's Public Burning (1977), which for those who haven't read it (and i'm only 50 pages in) is about the Rosenburg trials and features Uncle Sam as a wild west/Captain America who takes out The Phantom aka Communism. And Nixon is the other main character.


Anyways, bad summary...see wikipedia for a better one. But, the prose is beautiful and amazing and hyperbolic and everything good and clever and inventive about postmodernism.

So in doing research about the book, I found this interview with Coover:

"By the time 1972 rolled around, what I had was a substantial piece of a novel--and a lot of research still left to do. I was running out of money, so I accepted a visiting teaching job at Princeton for a year; I also had a play, "The Kid," premiering in New York at the time, and I wanted to be back for that. The Princeton libraries were good sources for the kind of research I was doing, but that research now seemed endless, and the prospects of extricating myself from it in any kind of timely fashion grew more and more remote. I also did a bit of traveling. To get the settings right, as you might say."

So this totally subversive book was written write in our own literary playground. Huzzah!