14 Facts About John Barth

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

John Barth's 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.

John Barth was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.

John Barth, called "Jack", was born in Cambridge, Maryland, on May 27,1930.

John Barth had 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, Barth was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his second wife, Shelly Rosenberg.

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

John Barth died under hospice care in Bonita Springs, Florida, on April 2,2024, at the age of 93.

John Barth's career began with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short realist novels that deal with controversial topics: suicide and abortion, respectively.

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

The essay was widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel", but John 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.