Robert Coover

A Political Fable is a 1980 novella by Robert Coover. It was originally published, in slightly different form, in New American Review in 1968, under the title "The Cat in the Hat for President".

A nameless rider plods through the desert toward a dusty Western town shimmering on the horizon. In his latest novel, Robert Coover has taken the familiar form of the Western and turned it inside out. The lonesome stranger reaches the town - or rather, it reaches him - and he becomes part of its gunfights, saloon …