Writer and educator, born in Cambridge, Maryland, USA. He studied at Johns Hopkins University where, during a long academic career, he joined the English faculty in 1973. His novels, some set on Maryland's Eastern Shore, were distinctive for their formal ingenuity and an existential questioning bordering on nihilism. They include The End of the Road (1958), Chimera (1972, National Book Award), and Tidewater Tales (1988). A major exception was his second novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a long, playful parody written in the style of an 18th-c novel. Later books include Coming Soon!!! (2003) and Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas (2005).
John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland and briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, receiving a B.A.
He was a professor at Penn State University (1953-1965), University at Buffalo (1965-1973), Boston University (visiting professor, 1972-1973), and Johns Hopkins University (1973-1995) before he retired in 1995.
Literary work
Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short novels that dealt wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively.
The Sot-Weed Factor was an unprecedented leap in literature, an 800-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland based on an actual poet, Ebenezer Cook, who wrote a poem of that name. The Sot-Weed Factor was what Northrop Frye called an anatomy — a large, loosely structured work, with digressions, distractions, stories within stories, and lists (such as a lengthy exchange of insulting terms by two prostitutes).
Barth's next book, Giles Goat-Boy, of comparable size, was a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. It could be described as a fictional gospel about a half-man half-goat who discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a university that allegorically represents the universe, presented as a computer tape given to John Barth, who denies that it is his work.
While writing those books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (first printed in the Atlantic, 1967), that was widely considered to be a statement of "the death of the novel" (Compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author").
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