John Simmons Barth (;"Barth".
Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. born May 27, 1930) is an American writer who is best known for his postmodernist and metafictional fiction.
Life
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.
He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at JuilliardTownsend, Victoria.
Pennsylvania Center for the Book.
Spring 2005  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.
From 1953 to 1965, Barth was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his second and current wife, Shelly Rosenberg."
John Barth" FAQ, http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/barth/faqs 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.Barth (1984) intro to The Literature of Exhaustion, in The Friday Book.
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.
Literary work
Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short realist 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.John Barth (1987) Foreword to Doubleday Anchor Edition of The Sot-Weed Factor The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of postmodernism.
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.
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.Clavier, Berndt (2007) John Barth and Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage pp.
165–167 Styles, approaches and artistic criteria
Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary traditionConversations with Kurt Vonnegut 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."
Elias, Amy J. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction.
p. 224.Lampkin, Loretta M.; Barth, John "An Interview with John Barth".
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 1988), pp.
485-497.
In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device.Hutcheon Linda.
Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox.
pp.
50-51.
Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that "The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less."
Samet, Tom.
"The Modulated Vision: Lionel Trilling's 'Larger Naturalism'".
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring 1978), pp.
539–557.
<br/>Quotation: novel is the process of its own making.
"The process is the content, more or less," John Barth has recently declared,<sup>38</sup> thus turning [Mark] Schorer's position on its head.Prescott, Peter S.; Prescott, Anne Lake.
Encounters with American Culture, Volume 2, p. 137.
Google Books.
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.
Essays
While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing.
In 1967, he wrote a highly influential Contemporary Literature  2000 and, to some, controversial 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".p.72
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.
Awards
1956 — National Book Award finalist for The Floating Opera "National Book Awards – 1956".
National Book Foundation.
Retrieved 2012-03-30.
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 "National Book Awards – 1973".
National Book Foundation.
Retrieved 2012-03-30.
<br/>(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 split award.)
1974 — Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1974 — Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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 OperaJohn Barth Wins Iranian Literary Prize, Powell's Books.John Barth's statement to Iranian literary prize, Roozi Rozegari.
Selected works
Fiction
The Floating Opera (1956)
The End of the Road (1958)
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966)
Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (stories) (1968)
Chimera (three linked novellas) (1972)
LETTERS (1979)
Sabbatical: A Romance (1982)
The Tidewater Tales (1987)
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)
Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (memoirish novel) (1994)
On with the Story (stories) (1996)
Coming Soon!!!
: A Narrative (2001)
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004)
Where Three Roads Meet (three linked novellas) (2005)
The Development: Nine Stories (2008)
Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011)
Collected Stories (2015)
Nonfiction
The Friday Book (1984)
Further Fridays (1995)
Final Fridays (2012)
See also
Maryland literature
Notes and references
Further reading
Rovit, Earl, "The Novel as Parody: John Barth."
Critique 6 (Fall 1963).
Dean, Gabrielle, and Charles B. Harris, eds.
(2016).
John Barth: A Body of Words.
Dalkey Archive Press.
978-1-56478-869-6
External links
Vida, Obra y Libros usados de John Barth
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
Category:20th-century American novelists Category:20th-century American male writers Category:American short story writers Category:Postmodern writers Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:National Book Award winners Category:People from Cambridge, Maryland Category:Novelists from Maryland Category:Boston University faculty Category:Johns Hopkins University alumni Category:Johns Hopkins University faculty Category:Juilliard School alumni Category:Pennsylvania State University faculty Category:University at Buffalo faculty Category:PEN/Malamud Award winners Category:1930 births Category:Living people Category:21st-century American novelists Category:American male novelists Category:American male short story writers Category:Novelists from Pennsylvania Category:Novelists from Massachusetts
