John Barth

John Barth
John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American writer who is best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history, Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world, and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.
Life
John Barth, called "Jack", was born in Cambridge, Maryland. He has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister Jill. In 1947 he graduated from Cambridge High School, where he played drums and wrote for the school newspaper. He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952. His thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus, drew on his experiences at Johns Hopkins.
Barth married Harriet Anne Strickland on January 11, 1950. He published two short stories that same year, one in Johns Hopkins's student literary magazine and one in The Hopkins Review. His daughter, Christine Ann, was born in the summer of 1951. His son, John Strickland, was born the following year.
From 1953 to 1965, Barth was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his second and current wife, Shelly Rosenberg. His third child, Daniel Stephen, was born in 1954. In 1965, he moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know "the remarkable short fiction" of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse.
Barth later taught at Boston University as a visiting professor in 1972–73 and at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until he retired in 1995.
Literary work
Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short realist novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. They are straightforward realistic tales; as Barth later remarked, they "didn't know they were novels".
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960; the title is an archaic phrase meaning "the tobacco merchant") was initially intended as completing a trilogy of "realist" novels, but developed into a different project and is seen as marking Barth's discovery of postmodernism. It reimagines the life of Ebenezer Cooke, a poet in colonial Maryland, and recounts a series of fantastic and often comic adventures, including a farcical revisionist account of the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, eventually leading Cooke to write the narrative poem of the title.
Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), is a lengthy satirical fantasy based on the conceit of a university as the world of the Cold War, divided into a secretive East Campus and a more open West Campus. George Giles, a boy raised as a goat, discovers his humanity and sets out on a quest to become a "Grand Tutor", a messiah-like spiritual leader within the university. The story is presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies in the text that it is his work. In the course of the novel Giles carries out all the tasks attributed to mythical heroes in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It was a surprise best-seller and raised Barth's profile, calling more attention to his earlier work.
The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
In his epistolary novel LETTERS (1979), Barth corresponds with characters from his other books. Later novels such as The Tidewater Tales (1987) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) continue in the metafictional vein, using writers as protagonists who interact with their own and other stories in elaborate ways. His 1994 Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera casts Barth himself as the protagonist who on a sailing trip encounters characters and situations from previous works.
Styles, approaches and artistic criteria
Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said, "I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [...] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time." In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device.
Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that "The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less."
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay and the sympathetic characterization and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.
Essays
While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing.
In 1967, he wrote a highly influential and, to some, controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a "used-up" tradition; Barth's description of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is "novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author".
The essay was widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel", (compare with Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1980) wrote a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment", to clarify the point.
Awards
1956 — National Book Award finalist for The Floating Opera
1966 — National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in literature
1965 — The Brandeis University creative arts award in fiction
1965-66 — The Rockefeller Foundation grant in fiction
1968 — Nominated for the National Book Award for Lost in the Funhouse
1973 — Shared the National Book Award for Chimera with John Edward Williams for Augustus
1974 — Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1974 — Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1997 — F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction
1998 — Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award
1998 — PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story
1999 — Enoch Pratt Society's Lifetime Achievement in Letters Award
2008 — Roozi Rozegari, Iranian literature prize for best foreign work translation The Floating Opera
Bibliography
Novels
The Floating Opera (1956)
The End of the Road (1958)
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
Giles Goat-Boy (1966)
LETTERS (1979)
Sabbatical: A Romance (1982)
The Tidewater Tales (1987)
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)
Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994)
Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001)
Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011)
Short stories collection
Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1966)
Chimera (1972)
On with the Story (1996)
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004)
Where Three Roads Meet (2005)
The Development: Nine Stories (2008)
Collected Stories (2015)
Nonfiction
The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (1984)
Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984-1994 (1995)
Final Fridays: Essays, Lectures, Tributes & Other Nonfiction, 1995- (2012)
Postscripts (or Just Desserts): Some Final Scribblings (2022)
See also
Maryland literature
Notes and references
Further reading
Rovit, Earl, "The Novel as Parody: John Barth." Critique 6 (Fall 1963).
Dean, Gabrielle, and Charles B. Harris, eds. (2016). John Barth: A Body of Words. Dalkey Archive Press. 978-1-56478-869-6
External links
Vida, Obra y Libros usados de John Barth
North American Postmodern Fiction: John Barth
Barth audio goodies at the Lannan site
Barth on KCRW's radio program 'Bookworm' with Michael Silverblatt
click!, a short story by John Barth centered on hypertextuality
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American novelists
American short story writers
American parodists
Parody novelists
Postmodern writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
People from Cambridge, Maryland
Novelists from Maryland
Boston University faculty
Johns Hopkins University alumni
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Juilliard School alumni
Pennsylvania State University faculty
University at Buffalo faculty
PEN/Malamud Award winners
1930 births
Living people
American male novelists
American male short story writers
Novelists from Pennsylvania
Novelists from Massachusetts
Novelists from New York (state)
21st-century American male writers