The Floating Opera

The Floating Opera

First edition
Author	John Barth
Country	United States
Language	English
Publication date	1956 1967 (revised)

The Floating Opera is a novel by American writer John Barth, first published in 1956 and significantly revised in 1967. Barth's first published work, the existentialist and nihilist story is a first-person account of a day protagonist Todd Andrews contemplated suicide.

Critics and Barth himself often pair The Floating Opera with Barth's next novel, The End of the Road (1958); both were written in 1955, and are available together in a one-volume edition. Both are philosophical novels; The End of the Road continues with the conclusions made about absolute values by the protagonist of The Floating Opera, and takes these ideas "to the end of the road". Barth wrote both novels in a realistic mode, in contrast to Barth's better-known metafictional, fabulist, and postmodern works from the 1960s and later, such as Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and LETTERS (1979).

While teaching at Penn State, Barth embarked on a cycle of 100 stories he called Dorchester Tales; he abandoned it halfway through to begin his first two published novels. He completed both The Floating Opera and The End of the Road in 1955. After a string of publisher rejections, Appleton-Century-Crofts agreed to published The Floating Opera in 1956, but stipulated it "conclude on a less 'nihilist' note"; Barth complied and altered the ending. Sales were not strong enough to encourage the publisher to pick up Barth's next offering, which was felt to be too similar to the first book. The End of the Road was published by Doubleday in 1958; it received only marginally more attention than The Floating Opera. Barth made a number of changes to the text for a revised edition from Anchor Books in 1967, including restoration of the original ending. Anchor collected Barth's first two novels in a single-volume edition in 1988.