John Simmons Barth, called "Jack", was born inCambridge, Maryland, on May 27, 1930. His parents were John Jacob and Georgia (Simmons) Barth. His father ran a candy store.[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 theJuilliard School[6] before attendingJohns 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 inThe Hopkins Review. His daughter, Christine Ann, was born in the summer of 1951. His son, John Strickland, was born the following year.[5]
Barth taught atBoston University as a visiting professor in 1972,[11] then at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until he retired in 1991 with theemeritus rank.[12][13]
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 ofpostmodernism.[17] It reimagines the life ofEbenezer Cooke, a poet in colonial Maryland, and recounts a series of fantastic and often comic adventures, including an account of the story of CaptainJohn Smith andPocahontas.[18]
Barth's next novel,Giles Goat-Boy (1966), is a lengthy satirical fantasy serving as anallegory of theCold War, set in a university divided into an authoritarian East Campus and a more open West Campus.[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 some consider it Barth's best work.[22]
The short story collectionLost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collectionChimera (1972) are even moremetafictional 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 novelLETTERS (1979), Barth corresponds with characters from his other books. Later novels such asThe Tidewater Tales (1987) andThe 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 1994Once 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]
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]
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 inThe Atlantic in 1967). It depictsliterary 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]
^abNelles, 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.ISBN0787631361.
^ab"National Book Awards – 1973"Archived May 14, 2019, at theWayback 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 andAugustus includes Augenbraum's discussion of the shared award.)
^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.
^Michaels, Leonard (September 24, 1972)."Chimera".The New York Times.Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. RetrievedApril 9, 2024.
^Edwards, Thomas R. (September 30, 1979)."A Novel of Correspondences".The New York Times.Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. RetrievedApril 9, 2024.
^Schuessler, Jennifer (November 4, 2001)."The End of the Road?".The New York Times.Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. RetrievedApril 8, 2024.
^Friedell, Deborah (December 25, 2005)."If This Were a Headline".The New York Times.Archived from the original on April 9, 2024. RetrievedApril 8, 2024.
^Kendrick, Walter (November 18, 1984)."His peeves and enthusiasms".The New York Times.Archived from the original on April 10, 2024. RetrievedApril 9, 2024.
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