John Barth
| John Barth | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 27, 1930 Cambridge, Maryland, US |
| Occupation | novelist, professor |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1956–present |
| Genre | Postmodernism, Metafiction |
| Notable awards |
National Book Award 1973 Chimera |
John Simmons Barth (/bɑːrθ/; born May 27, 1930) is an American writer, best known for his postmodernist and metafictional fiction.
John Barth, called "Jack", was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus).
Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965, where he met his second and current wife, Shelly Rosenberg. During the "American high Sixties," he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York 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.
He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995.
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".
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