  We extend a previous Landau-gauge study of subtractive renormalization of the
fermion propagator Dyson-Schwinger equation (DSE) in strong-coupling, quenched
QED_4 to arbitrary covariant gauges. We use the fermion-photon proper vertex
proposed by Curtis and Pennington with an additional correction term included
to compensate for the small gauge-dependence induced by the ultraviolet
regulator. We discuss the chiral limit and the onset of dynamical chiral
symmetry breaking in the presence of nonperturbative renormalization. We
extract the critical coupling in several different gauges and find evidence of
a small residual gauge-dependence in this quantity.
