15 Facts About John Barth

John Simmons Barth is an American writer who is best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction.

John Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister Jill.

John Barth published two short stories that same year, one in Johns Hopkins's student literary magazine and one in The Hopkins Review.

John Barth's daughter, Christine Ann, was born in the summer of 1951.

John Barth's son, John Strickland, was born the following year.

From 1953 to 1965, John Barth was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his second and current wife, Shelly Rosenberg.

John Barth's third child, Daniel Stephen, was born in 1954.

John 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.

John Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy, 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 John Barth, who denied that it was his work.

John Barth kept a list of the tasks taped to his wall while he was writing the book.

John Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism.

John 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.

John 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.

John Barth later wrote a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment", to clarify the point.