John Barth

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John Simmons Barth (Template:IPAc-en;<ref>"Barth" Template:Webarchive. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.</ref> 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 Simmons Barth, called "Jack", was born in Cambridge, Maryland, on May 27, 1930. His parents were John Jacob and Georgia (Simmons) Barth. His father ran a candy store.<ref name=":5" /><ref name=":1" /> He had an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill.<ref name=":1" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1947, he graduated from Cambridge High School, where he played drums and wrote for the school newspaper.<ref name=giles>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> He briefly studied Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration at the Juilliard School<ref>Townsend, Victoria. Pennsylvania Center for the Book. Spring 2005 Template:Webarchive</ref> before attending Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite news</ref> His thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus, drew on his experiences at Johns Hopkins.<ref name=":3" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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.<ref name=giles/>

From 1953 to 1965, Barth was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his second wife,Template:Clarify Shelly Rosenberg.<ref name="http://www.davidlouisedelman.com">"John Barth" FAQ, http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/barth/faqs Template:Webarchive</ref> His third child, Daniel Stephen, was born in 1954.<ref name=":3">Template:Cite web</ref> 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.<ref>Barth, introduction to The Literature of Exhaustion, in The Friday Book (1984).</ref>

Barth taught at Boston University as a visiting professor in 1972,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> then at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until he retired in 1991 with the emeritus rank.<ref name=":4">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=":2" />

Barth died under hospice care in Bonita Springs, Florida, on April 2, 2024, at the age of 93.<ref name=":5">Template:Cite web</ref>

Literary work

Barth's career began with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short realist<ref name="1987SWF"/> novels that deal with controversial topics: suicide and abortion, respectively.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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<ref name="1987SWF">John Barth (1987) Foreword to Doubleday Anchor Edition of The Sot-Weed Factor</ref> and is seen as marking Barth's discovery of postmodernism.<ref name="Clavier2007p165"/> 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), is a lengthy satirical fantasy serving as an allegory of the Cold War, set in a university divided into an authoritarian East Campus and a more open West Campus.<ref> Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> The novel was a surprise best-seller,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and some consider it Barth's best work.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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.<ref name=nba1973/>

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.<ref name="Clavier2007p165">Clavier, Berndt (2007) John Barth and Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage pp. 165–167</ref>

Styles, approaches and artistic criteria

Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition<ref>Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut</ref> 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."<ref name="Elias2001p224">Elias, Amy J. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. p. 224.</ref><ref>Lampkin, Loretta M.; Barth, John "An Interview with John Barth" Template:Webarchive. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 1988), pp. 485–497.</ref> In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device.<ref>Hutcheon Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. pp. 50–51.</ref>

Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that "The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less."<ref>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.</ref><ref>Prescott, Peter S.; Prescott, Anne Lake. Encounters with American Culture, Volume 2, p. 137. Google Books.</ref>

Essays

While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967, he wrote a highly influential<ref>[1] Contemporary Literature 2000</ref> and controversial<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> 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".<ref>p.72</ref> The essay was widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel",<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In 1980, he wrote and published another essay, "The Literature of Replenishment".<ref name=":4" />

Awards

Bibliography

Novels

Short story collections

Nonfiction

See also

Notes and references

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Further reading

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