John Barth

Who Was John Barth?

John Barth was the most technically inventive and self-consciously literary of the American postmodernist novelists — a writer whose work made the conventions of fiction into its subject, exploring the relationship between storytelling and reality with a wit, erudition, and formal ingenuity that earned him a central place in the American literary canon of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Cambridge, Maryland, educated at Johns Hopkins, he taught creative writing at Penn State, SUNY Buffalo, and Johns Hopkins for most of his career.

His early novels — The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) — were existentialist in orientation, grappling with nihilism and the problem of choice in a world without inherent meaning. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966) moved toward the encyclopedic, parodic mode that would define his mature work. His short fiction collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) is one of the landmarks of American postmodernist writing.

Barth’s central preoccupation is the relationship between narrative and reality: the way stories constitute rather than merely represent the world, the way the conventions of fiction shape what can be said and thought. This preoccupation is significant for TLA because it raises, in secular form, questions that are deeply theological: what is the master narrative, who tells it, and what authority does it have?

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Floating Opera — 1956
• The End of the Road — 1958
• The Sot-Weed Factor — 1960
• Giles Goat-Boy — 1966
• Lost in the Funhouse — 1968 — short fiction
• Chimera — 1972 — National Book Award