When I transferred to Bard from UCLA in 1966, the first class I signed up for at that small liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley was a seminar on “Don Quixote” taught by a young writer named Robert Coover. Coover had just published his first novel, “The Origin of the Brunists,” an apocalyptic social satire that won PEN’s Faulkner Award, so he was a rising star at the start of what would turn out to be a big career as a restlessly innovative, daringly provocative, critically acclaimed postmodern-metafictionist.

In other early novels such as “The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor” (an irreverent extended theological riff on a dice-throwing God as the inventor of a tabletop baseball game) and “The Public Burning” (an epic account of the execution of convicted atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as told by Richard Nixon) Coover established himself as an American original.

In 1968 his slapstick story “The Cat in the Hat for President” made gleefully anarchic mayhem of a U.S. presidential election. Eventually his experiments with deconstructed fairy tales, borderline obscenity, comical violence and hypertext (don’t ask) lost me as a reader, but as one of the first real writers I ever met, he made a tremendous impression on my 19-year-old mind. I’m thinking about him now because I just read his obituary in The New York Times; he died last Saturday, at 92.

Coover’s father, I learned from the Times obit, was a newspaper editor in the small town where he grew up in Iowa. That must have been where he learned the mechanics of layout and production, which he applied to The Bard Papers, a campus magazine in tabloid format that he organized and edited to publish student writing. The front page of the first issue featured a paper I had written for a literature class on the Book of Ecclesiastes, “The Sorrows of Wisdom,” my first critical essay to appear in print.

There were no creative writing classes at Bard then, no poetry or fiction workshops, but during winter field period — a six-week break from Upstate New York weather — my self-selected project was to read and write poems, which I was just beginning to do in earnest and in something resembling modern verse. What I wrote were weak imitations of E.E. Cummings, W.H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rupert Brooke and others. I still remember Coover’s written comment on those poems: “The ease with which you pick up other people’s voices and put them to your own consistent uses leads me to think you will sooner or later find your way to long prose. This poetry, crafty and sensitive as it is, still feels like ‘hobby poetry’; the deeper reaches seem as yet untapped.” This wasn’t exactly praise, but it was an honest response that seemed to take me seriously as an aspiring writer. Years later, long after we had both left Bard, in an act of extraordinary generosity, he nominated me for a Guggenheim Fellowship.

But his greatest gift to me, when I was his student in that Cervantes seminar, was during office hours when I would show up just to hang out with him. He put up with my company, I guess on account of my curiosity and enthusiasm, and shared with me all kinds of tales and thoughts and reading recommendations and literary gossip, and as I got to know him a little I felt more and more in awe of his voracious intellect and the vast range of interests fueling his imagination. His mind was on fire with creative energy, ideas, ambition and passionate commitment to his art. He was a living example of what it meant to be a writer. I would leave his office after one of our meetings with my consciousness turbocharged, my brain aglow by association.

We hadn’t been in touch for about 40 years, but I remember him with gratitude for the time and attention he gave me when our paths crossed briefly at such a formative moment.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.