BIO

Autobiography of Robert Gover

     When I was 11 months old, my father was killed in an auto accident. He had just graduated from a medical college in Philadelphia and was on his way to Minnesota to study brain surgery. My mother, 23 years old at the time, was traumatized. I was put into an orphanage, Girard College, at age 8.
     Girard had an exceptional swimming coach and I mastered the butterfly when it was being invented and still part of the breaststroke event. Our team won the Eastern States High School Championship, a big deal for a small orphanage. Coming out of high school I had scholarship offers to a dozen universities, and chose the University of Pittsburgh because of its highly regarded writing program. In my junior year at Pitt I became fascinated with economics and graduated with a BA in that discipline. I took night school post-graduate courses in writing and Dr. Peterson, head of the writing program at Pitt, continued to critique my short stories.
For six years I worked as a newspaper reporter, with one year’s “sabbatical” to do corporate public relations, and worked on novels during evenings and weekends.
My first novel, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, a satire on American racism, was roundly rejected in the USA but enthusiastically accepted and published in France, where it received glowing reviews in 1961. Around the same time, a British edition appeared and was roundly castigated by the British book reviewers. It was then published in the USA where the New York Times Book Review Section praised it on page 3—before someone in management read it, and thereafter the Times refused to take advertisements for it.
In the late sixties, I signed a multi-book contract for what was then a record advance. This contract was broken some years later by a new corporate boss. His announcement came almost simultaneous with the cover of my novel Poorboy at the Party appearing on the cover of Publishers Weekly Magazine. When I said, “Hey, that’s illegal,” he said, “So sue.” This company had my life insured for around $8 million dollars; my agent advised I not sue but instead make myself scarce till the insurance policy ran out. Although it drove me over the edge, I took his advice and, after about a decade of self-destructive behavior, lived to tell about it.
     My novels tend to question and poke fun at American taboos such as miscegenation, Euro-centric misperceptions of voodoo, and the respect shown the rich because they’re rich. It seems I was born with a driving desire to explore the forbidden and question cherished assumptions.
In my novel writing, I aim to be concise and precise, producing works that are called “minimalist” by academicians. I must also plead guilty to the accusation of writing “political” novels; politics is how we decide who gets how much of collectively produced wealth and I feel we can do this more justly than we now do. I believe in popular democracy and wish to see medieval assumptions about aristocracy and oligarchy revealed as ridiculous in the 20th and 21st centuries.
     I became interested in astrology in the mid-sixties. At first my aim was to refute it as bogus, but as I studied it and observed the effects of transiting planets in my own life, I became fascinated. When personal computers and astrological programs greatly facilitated research, I combined my interest in economics and astrology. Since then I’ve searched for and found planetary cycles which repeatedly coincide with economic cycles, and have written numerous articles and one book about this phenomenon, Time and Money: the Economy and the Planets.
     Being an iconoclastic novelist with a passion for economic astrology makes me difficult to categorize, and the only award I’ve ever won is “Most Unsung Writer in America,” presented at the 1985 PEN International Congress by Kurt Vonnegut. Years ago I learned that I can collect trophies and feel proud, or I can explore the unexplored and feel joy, but it is not my destiny to do both.