John Barth life and biography

John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. They are straightforward tales; as Barth later remarked, they "didn't know they were novels."

The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth's next novel, is an 800-page satirical epic of the colonization of Maryland based on the life of an actual poet, Ebenezer Cooke, who wrote a poem of the same title. The Sot-Weed Factor is what Northrop Frye called an anatomy — a large, loosely structured work, with digressions, distractions, stories within stories, and lists (such as a lengthy exchange of insulting terms by two prostitutes). The fictional Ebenezer Cooke (repeatedly described as "poet and virgin") is a Candide-like innocent who sets out to write a heroic epic, becomes disillusioned and ends up writing a biting satire.

Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy, of comparable size, is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. 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 denies that it is 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 and the novella collection Chimera, the latter for which Barth received the National Book Award, are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. In LETTERS Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.

Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.

Author of books:

The Floating Opera (1956, novel)
The End of the Road (1958, novel)
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960, novel)
Giles Goat-Boy (1966, novel)
Lost in the Funhouse (1968, short stories, serialized in 1967)
Chimera (1972, short stories)
Letters (1979, novel)
Sabbatical: A Romance (1982, novel)
The Tidewater Tales (1987, novel)
Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991, novel)
On with the Story (1996, short stories)
Coming Soon!!! (2001, novel)
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004, short stories)

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