John Barth

John Simmons Barth (/bɑːrθ/; May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024) was an American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His 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. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.

John Simmons Barth, called "Jack", was born in Cambridge, Maryland, on May 27, 1930. His parents were John Jacob and Georgia (Simmons) Barth. His father ran a candy store. He had 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 the Juilliard School 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 wife,^{[clarification needed]} Shelly Rosenberg. His third child, Daniel Stephen, was born in 1954. In 1965, he moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught 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 taught at Boston University as a visiting professor in 1972, then at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until he retired in 1991 with the emeritus rank.

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

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.

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 and is seen as marking Barth's discovery of postmodernism. It reimagines the life of Ebenezer Cooke, a poet in colonial Maryland, and recounts a series of fantastic and often comic adventures, including an account of the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.