John Barth
John Barth was a prominent American author renowned for his influential contributions to postmodern literature. Born in 1930 in Maryland, Barth's upbringing on the Eastern Shore significantly shaped his writing landscape. He initially pursued music before shifting focus to creative writing, earning both a bachelor's and master's degree from Johns Hopkins University. Barth's literary career flourished in the 1950s and 1960s with notable works such as "The Floating Opera," "The Sot-Weed Factor," and "Giles Goat-Boy," which showcase his satirical style and exploration of narrative structure.
Barth was a key proponent of self-reflexivity in fiction, famously arguing that literature should draw attention to its own creation. His experimental approach often intertwined mythical elements with contemporary themes, a method that gained acclaim throughout his career. He received multiple honors, including the PEN/Malamud Award and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award, recognizing his outstanding contributions to American literature. Barth’s extensive body of work includes novels, short stories, and critical essays, culminating in his final collection of nonfiction in 2022. He passed away in 2024, leaving behind a legacy that continues to challenge and inspire writers and readers alike.
John Barth
American postmodern fiction writer and essayist.
- Born: May 27, 1930
- Place of Birth: Cambridge, Maryland
- Died: April 2, 2024
- Place of Death: Bonita Springs, Florida
John Barth fostered an impactful career as a widely celebrated author. He was considered one of the most influential and trailblazing American writers of the postmodernist era.
Background
John “Jack” Simmons Barth and his twin, Jill, were born to John Jacob and Georgia Simmons Barth in 1930. They and their older brother, Bill, grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, which served as the principal setting in most of his fiction.
After finishing high school, Barth attended the Juilliard School of Music and then enrolled at Johns Hopkins University in 1947, pursuing a degree in journalism. By the time of his junior year, however, because of the influence of one of his professors, he decided to become a teacher and a fiction writer instead. Barth received his bachelor’s degree in creative writing in 1951.
By 1952, he had completed his master’s degree at Johns Hopkins and begun his doctoral work there. In 1953, he left the university because of a lack of funds and took a teaching position in the English department at Pennsylvania State University, University Park.
Literary Career
The years from 1955 to 1960 were perhaps the most important in John Barth’s career. During that time, he published The Floating Opera (nominated for the National Book Award in 1956, the same year it was published), The End of the Road (1958), and The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), and he began work on Giles Goat-Boy (1966). Although Barth’s first two novels are realistic works, they contain the seeds of the satiric element that started to dominate his writing with the publication of his subsequent two novels. Both The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy are broad, picaresque works that show affinities with the tradition of the eighteenth-century novels of Jonathan Swift, Laurence Stern, and Henry Fielding. What makes these sprawling satires distinctly contemporary, however, is their self-conscious erudition and concern with the processes of fiction.
In 1967 and 1968, Barth made his alignment with the postmodernist focus on fiction as a self-reflexive art form even more explicit. First, he published a controversial essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Literature of Exhaustion,” which urged more of the self-conscious experimentation practiced by the South American writer Jorge Luis Borges. (Many misinterpreted the essay, thinking Barth was arguing that fiction writers had “run out” of subjects for their work.) Barth then turned from the novel genre to that of the short story with Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, and Live Voice (1968), an experimental collection whose stories do not adhere to their so-called proper subject—the external world—but instead continually turn the reader’s attention back to what Barth considered their real subject: the process of fiction-making. The fictional works published after Lost in the Funhouse are similarly focused on their own narrative structure and methods.
Barth’s approach to fiction has been summarized quite pointedly in the essays that appear in his collection of occasional pieces entitled The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (1984); he asserts that the novelist is like God and that God is like a novelist, for the universe itself is like a novel. This notion that the novel is not simply a view of a world but rather a world itself is a common theme of postmodernist fiction, for which Barth was one of the best-known practitioners and advocates.
Barth’s most admired storyteller is Scheherazade, the hero of A Thousand and One Nights (c. 1450), to whom he pays homage most directly in a novella in his work Chimera (1972) and who also appears in his novel The Tidewater Tales (1987). Yet, Barth has been fascinated with mythical figures at least since 1964, when, while working on Giles Goat-Boy, he discovered studies of myth such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). After that time, Barth’s fiction became self-consciously concerned with the primal elements that make up the universe of story. In fact, in his autobiographical novel Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994), he claims that all of his novels, starting with The Sot-Weed Factor, are structured around the myth of the hero.
Barth insisted that the prosaic in fiction is there only to be transformed into fabulation. For Barth, the artist’s ostensible subject is not the main point; instead, it is the raw material for focusing on the nature of the fiction-making process. Great literature, said Barth, is almost always about itself, regardless of how it appears. Perhaps more than any other American writer since World War II, Barth made fiction intensely conscious of itself, its traditions, and the conventions that made it possible. If, as some currents of thought suggest, reality itself is the result of fiction-making processes, then Barth is a writer concerned with the essential nature of what is real. Barth’s achievements were recognized in 1997 with the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for outstanding achievement in American literature and in 1998 with the PEN/Malamud Award, honoring excellence in the art of the short story, and the Lannan Literary Awards lifetime achievement award. In 1999, Barth was awarded the Enoch Pratt Society's Lifetime Achievement in Letters Award.
Barth published several works in the twenty-first century, including Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001); The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004); Where Three Roads Meet, a collection of three interrelated novellas (2005); The Development: Nine Stories (2008); Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011); and Final Fridays: Essays, Lectures, Tributes & Other Nonfiction, 1995–2012. In 2015, the Dalkey Archive Press released Collected Stories, comprising stories from four of Barth's previously published collections. In reviewing Collected Stories for the New York Times Sunday Book Review in December 2015, Stephen Burn wrote that he would give the award for best American writer over eighty to Barth. Barth published his final work, a collection of observational nonfiction compositions titled Postscripts (or Just Desserts): Some Final Scribblings, in 2022.
Amid his career as an author, Barth taught at several higher education institutions, including Pennsylvania State University, State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, Boston University, and his alma mater Johns Hopkins University.
On April 2, 2024, Barth died in hospice care in Bonita Springs, Florida, at the age of ninety-three.
Impact
An imaginative writer and revolutionary literary theorist, John Barth developed a writing style and artistic perspective that challenged theoretical and linguistic conventions of traditional literature throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He penned over twenty publications, including three critical essay collections, numerous novels and short story collections, and his final 2022 collection of concise nonfiction writings.
Personal Life
Barth was married to Harriette Anne Strickland from 1950 to 1969. They had a daughter and two sons. After his first marriage ended in divorce, Barth married Shelly Rosenberg in 1970.
Principal Works
Long Fiction
The Floating Opera, 1956
The End of the Road, 1958
The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960
Giles Goat-Boy: Or, The Revised New Syllabus, 1966
Chimera, 1972
Letters, 1979
Sabbatical: A Romance, 1982
The Tidewater Tales: A Novel, 1987
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, 1991
Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, 1994
Coming Soon!!!, 2001
Where Three Roads Meet, 2005
Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons, 2011
Short Fiction
Lost in the Funhouse, 1968
On with the Story, 1996
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories, 2004
Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas, 2005
The Development, 2008
Collected Stories, 2015
Nonfiction
A Conversation with John Barth, 1972 (edited by Frank Gado)
The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction, 1984
Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1995
Final Fridays: Essays, Lectures, Tributes & Other Nonfiction, 1995–2012
Postscripts (or Just Desserts): Some Final Scribblings, 2022
Bibliography
Barth, John. “Interview.” Short Story, vol. 1, 1993, pp. 110–18.
Bowen, Zack. “Barth and Joyce.” Critique, vol. 37, 1996, pp. 261–69.
Bowen, Zack. A Reader’s Guide to John Barth. Greenwood, 1994.
Burn, Stephen. “William H. Gass’s ‘Eyes’ and John Barth’s ‘Collected Stories.’” Review of Eyes, by William H. Gass, and Collected Stories, by John Barth. New York Times Sunday Book Review, 11 Dec. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/books/review/william-h-gasss-eyes-and-john-barths-collected-stories.html. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.
Clavier, Berndt. John Barth and Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage. Lang, 2008.
Domini, John. “John Barth Deserves a Wider Audience.” Literary Hub, 27 May 2020, lithub.com/john-barth-deserves-a-wider-audience. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Fogel, Stan, and Gordon Slethaug. Understanding John Barth. U of South Carolina P, 1990.
Garner, Dwight. “John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling's Limits, Dies at 93.” The New York Times, 2 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/books/john-barth-dead.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Harris, Charles B. Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth. U of Illinois P, 1983.
Kaufman, Michael T. "John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling’s Limits, Dies at 93." The New York Times, 3 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/books/john-barth-dead.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Kiernan, Robert F. “John Barth’s Artist in the Fun House.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 10, 1973, pp. 373–80.
Schulz, Max F. The Muses of John Barth: Tradition and Metafiction from “Lost in the Funhouse” to “The Tidewater Tales.” Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
Scott, Steven D. The Gamefulness of American Postmodernism: John Barth and Louise Erdrich. Lang, 2000.
Waldmeir, Joseph J., editor. Critical Essays on John Barth. Hall, 1980.
Wallach, Rachel. “John Barth, Towering Literary Figure and Revered Mentor, Dies at 93.” JHU Hub, 2 Apr. 2024, hub.jhu.edu/2024/04/02/john-barth-writing-seminars-obituary. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Zhang, Benzi. “Paradox of Origin(ality): John Barth’s ‘Menelaiad.’” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 32, 1995, pp. 199–208.