John Barth

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.[2] He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard[3] 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.[4]

From 1953 to 1965, Barth was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his second and current wife, Shelly Rosenberg.[5] His third child, Daniel Stephen, was born in 1954. During the "American high Sixties", he moved to teach at the State University of New York at Buffalo 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.[6]

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.

Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short realist[7] 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) was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two "realist" novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project.[7] The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of postmodernism.[8]

Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. Giles, a boy raised as a goat, discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denied that it was his work. In the course of the novel Giles carries out all the tasks prescribed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Barth kept a list of the tasks taped to his wall while he was writing the book.

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.[9]

In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books.

His 1994 Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas.[8]

Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition[10] 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."[11][12] In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device.[13]

Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that "The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less."[14][15]

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.

While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing.

In 1967, he wrote a highly influential[16] and, to some, controversial[17] 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".[18]

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.

• 1956 — National Book Award finalist for The Floating Opera[19]
• 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[9]
• 1974 — Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1974 — Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[20]
• 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[21][22]

• Maryland literature

• Rovit, Earl, "The Novel as Parody: John Barth." Critique 6 (Fall 1963).
• Clavier, Berndt (2007). John Barth And Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-6385-8.
• Gerdes, Eckhard (2001). John Barth, Bearded Bards and Splitting Hairs: The Journal of Experimental Fiction Seventeen. iUniverse. ISBN 978-1-4759-0189-4.
• Fogel, Stanley; Slethaug, Gordon (1990). Understanding John Barth. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-87249-660-6.
• 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.
• 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.
• Dean, Gabrielle, and Charles B. Harris, eds. (2016). John Barth: A Body of Words. Dalkey Archive Press. 978-1-56478-869-6

• Vida, Obra y Libros usados de John Barth

Wikiquote has quotations related to: John Barth

• George Plimpton (Spring 1985). "John Barth, The Art of Fiction No. 86". Paris Review.
• John Barth Information Center at the Library of Congress Web Archives (archived 2001-11-28)
• Scriptorium - John Barth at the Wayback Machine (archived 2014-06-24)
• Reading John Barth: an essay by Charles Harris (from CONTEXT Quarterly at CenterforBookCulture.org) at the Wayback Machine (archived 2012-02-05)
• 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