John Barth

For other people named John Barth, see John Barth (disambiguation).

John Barth
Barth in 1995
Born	(1930-05-27)May 27, 1930 Cambridge, Maryland, U.S.
Died	April 2, 2024(2024-04-02) (aged 93) Bonita Springs, Florida, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist academic
Education	Juilliard School Johns Hopkins University (BA, MA)
Period	1956–2022
Genre	Postmodernism metafiction
Notable awards	National Book Award 1973 Chimera

John Simmons Barth (/bɑːrθ/;^[1] May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024) was an American writer 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, on May 27, 1930.^[2][3] He had an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill.^[3][4] In 1947, he graduated from Cambridge High School, where he played drums and wrote for the school newspaper.^[5] He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at the Juilliard School^[6] before attending Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952.^[3] His thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus, drew on his experiences at Johns Hopkins.^[7][8]

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.^[5]

From 1953 to 1965, Barth was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his second wife, Shelly Rosenberg.^[9] His third child, Daniel Stephen, was born in 1954.^[7] 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.^[10]

Barth taught at Boston University as a visiting professor in 1972,^[11] then at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until he retired in 1991 with the emeritus rank.^[12][13]

Barth died under hospice care in Bonita Springs, Florida, on April 2, 2024, at the age of 93.^[2]

Literary work

Barth's career began with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short realist^[14] novels that deal with controversial topics: suicide and abortion, respectively.^[15][16]

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^[14] and is seen as marking Barth's discovery of postmodernism.^[17] It reimagines the life of Ebenezer Cooke, a poet in colonial Maryland, and recounts a series of fantastic and often comic adventures, including an account of the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.^[18]

Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), is a lengthy satirical fantasy serving as an allegory of the Cold War.^[19] 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.^[20] The novel was a surprise best-seller,^[21] and many consider it Barth's best work.^[22]

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.^[23]

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.^[17]

Styles, approaches and artistic criteria

Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition^[24] 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."^[25][26] In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device.^[27]

Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that "The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less."^[28][29]

Essays

While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967, he wrote a highly influential^[30] and controversial^[31] essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (first printed in The Atlantic in 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".^[32] The essay was widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel",^[33][34] but Barth later insisted that he had merely been making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there.^[35] In 1980, he wrote and published another essay, "The Literature of Replenishment".^[12]

Awards

• 1956: National Book Award finalist for The Floating Opera^[36]
• 1965: The Brandeis University creative arts award^[13]
• 1965: The Rockefeller Foundation grant^[13]
• 1966: National Institute of Arts and Letters grant^[13]
• 1968: Nominated for the National Book Award for Lost in the Funhouse^[37]
• 1973: Shared the National Book Award for Chimera with John Edward Williams for Augustus^[23]
• 1974: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters^[38][39]
• 1974: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[40]
• 1997: F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction^[39]
• 1998: Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award^[41]
• 1998: PEN/Malamud Award^[13]
• 1999: Enoch Pratt Society's Lifetime Achievement in Letters Award^[42]
• 2008: Roozi Rozegari, Iranian literature prize for best foreign work translation, The Floating Opera^[43][44]

Bibliography

Novels

• The Floating Opera (1956)^[45]
• The End of the Road (1958)^[3]
• The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)^[46]
• Giles Goat-Boy (1966)^[47]
• Chimera (1972)^[48]
• LETTERS (1979)^[49]
• Sabbatical: A Romance (1982)^[50]
• The Tidewater Tales (1987)^[51]
• The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)^[52]
• Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994)^[53]
• Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001)^[54]
• Where Three Roads Meet (2005)^[55]
• Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011)^[56]

Short stories collection

• Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1968)^[57]
• On with the Story (1996)^[58]
• The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004)^[59]
• The Development: Nine Stories (2008)^[60]
• Collected Stories (2015)^[61]

Nonfiction

• The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (1984)^[62][63]
• Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984–1994 (1995)^[13]
• Final Fridays: Essays, Lectures, Tributes & Other Nonfiction, 1995–2012 (2012)^[64][65]
• Postscripts (or Just Desserts): Some Final Scribblings (2022)^[66]

See also

• Maryland literature

Notes and references

1. "Barth" Archived December 26, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
2. "John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling's Limits, Dies at 93". The New York Times. April 2, 2024. Archived from the original on April 2, 2024. Retrieved April 2, 2024.
3. Smith, Harrison (April 2, 2024). "John Barth, novelist who orchestrated literary fantasies, dies at 93". The Washington Post. Retrieved April 8, 2024.
4. Lewis, John (November 2008). "On With The Story: Remembering Iconic Maryland Novelist John Barth". Baltimore Magazine. Archived from the original on April 8, 2024. Retrieved April 10, 2024.
5. Nelles, William (2000). "John Barth". In Giles, James R.; Giles, Wanda H. (eds.). American Novelists Since World War II: Sixth Series. Detroit, MI: The Gale Group. p. 38. ISBN 0787631361.
6. Townsend, Victoria. Pennsylvania Center for the Book. Spring 2005 Archived September 16, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
7. Pinto, Marita (April 3, 2024). "Who was John Barth? All about Postmodernist novelist as he passes away at 93". Pinkvilla. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
8. "Designs of tomorrow". Johns Hopkins University. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
9. "John Barth" FAQ, http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/barth/faqs Archived January 25, 2018, at the Wayback Machine
10. Barth, introduction to The Literature of Exhaustion, in The Friday Book (1984).
11. "John Barth, who expanded the boundaries of postmodern writing, dies at 93". The Boston Globe. April 3, 2024. Archived from the original on April 8, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
12. "Lost in the Funhouse". Encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on April 7, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
13. "John Barth". Encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on December 4, 2023. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
14. John Barth (1987) Foreword to Doubleday Anchor Edition of The Sot-Weed Factor
15. Satterfield, Ben (1983). "Facing the Abyss: "The Floating Opera" and "End of the Road"". CLA Journal. 26 (3): 341–352. ISSN 0007-8549. JSTOR 44329484 – via JSTOR.
16. Powers, Aaron (September 22, 2008). "John Barth: The End of the Road". South Coast Today. Retrieved April 10, 2024.
17. Clavier, Berndt (2007) John Barth and Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage pp. 165–167
18. Holder, Alan (1968). ""What Marvelous Plot... Was Afoot?" History in Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor"". American Quarterly. 20 (3): 596–604. doi:10.2307/2711019. ISSN 0003-0678. JSTOR 2711019.
19. Grausam, Daniel (2011). "Institutionalizing Postmodernism: John Barth and Modern War". On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War. University of Virginia Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-8139-3161-6. Retrieved May 2, 2012.
20. Mercer, Peter (1971). "The Rhetoric of "Giles Goat-Boy"". Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 4 (2): 147–158. doi:10.2307/1345149. ISSN 0029-5132. JSTOR 1345149. Archived from the original on October 22, 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2024 – via JSTOR.
21. Garner, Dwight (October 5, 2008). "Inside the List". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 31, 2023. Retrieved July 31, 2023.
22. Bryant, Joseph Allen (1997). Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-0937-4. Retrieved May 19, 2012.
23. "National Book Awards – 1973" Archived May 14, 2019, at the Wayback Machine. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-30.
    (With acceptance speech by Barth and two essays by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards' 60-year anniversary blog. The essay nominally about Williams and Augustus includes Augenbraum's discussion of the shared award.)
24. Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut
25. Elias, Amy J. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. p. 224.
26. Lampkin, Loretta M.; Barth, John "An Interview with John Barth" Archived June 25, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 1988), pp. 485–497.
27. Hutcheon Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. pp. 50–51.
28. Samet, Tom. "The Modulated Vision: Lionel Trilling's 'Larger Naturalism'". Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring 1978), pp. 539–557.
    Quotation: novel is the process of its own making. "The process is the content, more or less," John Barth has recently declared,³⁸ thus turning [Mark] Schorer's position on its head.
29. Prescott, Peter S.; Prescott, Anne Lake. Encounters with American Culture, Volume 2, p. 137. Google Books.
30. [1] Contemporary Literature 2000
31. "The Literature of Exhaustion". Archived from the original on May 21, 2012. Retrieved September 16, 2010.
32. p.72
33. Sacks, Sam (November 7, 2013). "Against "The Death of the Novel"". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
34. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2002). "The Exhaustion of Literature: Novels, Computers, and the Threat of Obsolescence". Contemporary Literature. 43 (3). University of Wisconsin Press: 518–559. doi:10.2307/1209111. ISSN 0010-7484. JSTOR 1209111. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
35. Motte, Warren (2001). "Jacques Jouet and the Literature of Exhaustion". Substance. 30 (3). Johns Hopkins University Press: 45–63. doi:10.2307/3685760. ISSN 0049-2426. JSTOR 3685760. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
36. "National Book Awards – 1956" Archived April 22, 2019, at the Wayback Machine. National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 30, 2012.
37. "Two Days at Penn With Short Storyist John Barth". University of Pennsylvania. April 11, 2012. Archived from the original on April 5, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
38. "John Barth Among 11 Named To Arts and Letters Body". The New York Times. February 7, 1974. p. 45. Archived from the original on April 5, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
39. Shields, Brian (March–April 2014). "Sheridan Libraries acquire John Barth Collection". Johns Hopkins University. Archived from the original on April 5, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
40. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 25, 2011. Retrieved May 18, 2011.
41. "Barth receives Lifetime Achievement award". Deseret News. October 11, 1998. Archived from the original on April 5, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
42. "Coming soon, John Barth; Writer: Maryland's most celebrated author has the first draft of his 'millennium novel' and will read a bit of it tomorrow". The Baltimore Sun. October 28, 1999. Archived from the original on April 5, 2024. Retrieved April 5, 2024.
43. John Barth Wins Iranian Literary Prize, Powell's Books Archived February 3, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
44. John Barth's statement to Iranian literary prize, Roozi Rozegari.
45. Prescott, Orville (September 3, 1956). "The Floating Opera". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
46. Fuller, Edmund (August 21, 1960). "The Joke Is on Mankind". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
47. Fremont-Smith, Eliot (August 3, 1966). "The Surfacing of Mr. Barth [Laughter]". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
48. Michaels, Leonard (September 24, 1972). "Chimera". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
49. Edwards, Thomas R. (September 30, 1979). "A Novel of Correspondences". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
50. Wood, Michael (June 20, 1982). "A metaphoric novel of the sea". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
51. Pritchard, William (June 28, 1987). "Between Blam and Blooey". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
52. Raban, Jonathan (February 3, 1991). "The Sloop of Araby". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
53. "Drifting around the island of self". Chicago Tribune. May 29, 1994. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
54. Schuessler, Jennifer (November 4, 2001). "The End of the Road?". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 8, 2024.
55. Friedell, Deborah (December 25, 2005). "If This Were a Headline". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 8, 2024.
56. Shields, Brian (October 16, 2015). "JHU exhibition celebrates distinguished career of author John Barth". Johns Hopkins University. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
57. "Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, 1968". Encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
58. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (July 11, 1996). "Of Love, Fear and Quantum Physics". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
59. Robinson, Tasha (April 20, 2004). "John Barth: The Book Of Ten Nights And A Night: Eleven Stories". The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
60. "The Development: Nine Stories". Kirkus Reviews. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 8, 2024.
61. Burn, Stephen (December 11, 2015). "William H. Gass's 'Eyes' and John Barth's 'Collected Stories'". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 8, 2024.
62. "The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction". Kirkus Reviews. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
63. Kendrick, Walter (November 18, 1984). "His peeves and enthusiasms". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 10, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
64. "Final Fridays: Essays, Lectures, Tributes & Other Non-Fiction, 1995–2012 by John Barth". Publishers Weekly. Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.
65. Barth, John (2012). Final Fridays: essays, lectures, tributes & other nonfiction, 1995–. Internet Archive. Berkeley. ISBN 978-1-58243-756-9.
66. "John Barth, American postmodernist novelist, dies aged 93". The Guardian. Associated Press. April 3, 2024. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on April 6, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2024.

Further reading

• Clavier, Berndt (2007). John Barth And Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-6385-8.
• Dean, Gabrielle, and Charles B. Harris, eds. (2016). John Barth: A Body of Words. Dalkey Archive Press. ISBN 978-1-56478-869-6.
• Fogel, Stanley; Slethaug, Gordon (1990). Understanding John Barth. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-87249-660-6.
• Gerdes, Eckhard (2001). John Barth, Bearded Bards and Splitting Hairs: The Journal of Experimental Fiction Seventeen. iUniverse. ISBN 978-1-4759-0189-4.
• Harris, Charles B. (1983). Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-01037-8.
• Lindsay, Alan (1995). Death in the Funhouse: John Barth and Poststructuralist Aesthetics. Peter Lang Publishing. ISBN 0-8204-2547-8.
• Rovit, Earl (Fall 1963), "The Novel as Parody: John Barth" (subscription required). Critique 6. doi:10.1080/00111619.1963.10689779.
• Vine, Richard Allan (1977). John Barth: an annotated bibliography. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-1003-7.
• Walkiewicz, E. P. (1986). John Barth. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-7461-0.

External links

• Vida, Obra y Libros usados de John Barth
• Plimpton, George (Spring 1985). "John Barth, The Art of Fiction No. 86". The Paris Review. Spring 1985 (95). Interview.
• John Barth Information Center at the Wayback Machine (archived December 17, 2013)
• Scriptorium – John Barth at the Wayback Machine (archived June 24, 2014)
• Reading John Barth: an essay by Charles Harris (from CONTEXT Quarterly at CenterforBookCulture.org) at the Wayback Machine (archived June 9, 2007)
• 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
• National Book Awards Acceptance Speech at the Wayback Machine (archived August 7, 2017)
• John Barth at IMDb
• John Barth discography at Discogs