John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the

postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

Biography
John Barth was born in 1930 in Cambridge, Maryland, and briefly studied "Elementary
Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University,
receiving a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952.
In 1950, Barth had married Harriet Ann Strickland, and by 1953 they had two children,
a daughter, Christine, born in 1951, and a son, John, born in 1952. A third child, David, was born in
1954.
He was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the
"American high Sixties," he moved to teach at SUNY/Buffalo, from 1965 to 1973.
Barth was divorced from Harriet Ann Strickland in 1970, and in 1971 he married Shelly
Rosenberg.
He later taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 19721973), and Johns Hopkins
University (19731995) before retiring in 1995.
Themes and writing style
John Barth in his novels portrays the life of American society in the second half of the
twentieth century.
Although Barth speaks ironically of the individual, society, and the world, he is
searching for positive values in them.
In this respect, Barth stands out as a representative of the educational tendency in
postmodern American literature.
. The writer aims to make the individual believe in the power of love and art to wake
him up prom spiritual paralysis. Barth wants to stir mans thinking.
His hero believes that there is no significant external reality, transcendental order of the
world, nor any absolutes.
However, Barths individual preserves a dream of Value.
Floating Opera
Barths first published novel, The Floating Opera, anticipates much of his subsequent
development in its playful devices and tone and in its thematic preoccupation with absurdity.
The first-person narrator and protagonist, Todd Andrews, recounts the experiences of his
life leading up to his decision not to commit suicide in 1937.
It establishes many of Barth's common themes and settings: the flawed, cynical (yet also
fun-loving) protagonist; impossible quests; the absurdities of society's structures and laws;
philosophy and morality; coastal Maryland and boating on the Chesapeake.
Though it is a simpler work than his later masterpieces, but it still shows definite signs
of genius, originality, and timelessness.
The End of the Road
In his next novel, The End of the Road, Barths speculations on the nature and necessity
of masks becomes more formulaic, although with somewhat bleaker results for his hero. Jake
Horner suffers from cosmopsis, a disease of hyperconsciousness: the awareness that one choice is
no more inherently valid or attractive than another.
In the novel Barth deftly explores important themes: the folly of taking philosophies to
logical extremes, and the need to accept and embrace paradox as well as be able to combine, or at
least try, various and flexible philosophies to survive in the larger world.

The novel was made into a 1970 movie. Barth expressed his discontent, calling it
"vulgar."
The Sot-Weed Factor
Barths third novel, perhaps his most widely acclaimed critical success, is written as a
flamboyant imitation of an eighteenth century novel.
"Sot-weed" is an old term for the tobacco plant. A "factor" is a middleman who buys
something to resell it.
The novel takes its title from a poem of the same name published in London in 1708
and signed Ebenezer Cooke.
It tells the story of an English poet named Ebenezer Cooke who undergoes many
adventures on his journey to Maryland and while in Maryland, all the while striving to preserve his
innocence (i.e. his virginity).
The use of parody, the elaborate structural devices in the novel, and the self-conscious
narrator all point to strategies that Barth subsequently found increasingly congenial to his aesthetic
program.
Giles Goat-Boy: Or, The Revised New Syllabus
It is a satire and allegory of the American campus culture of the time.
George Giles is a farm animal who rises in life to Grand Tutor of the New Tammany
College. He strives for herohood.
The novel abounds in mythological and Christian allegories, as well as in allusions to
the Cold War, 1960s academia, and religion.

Lost in the Funhouse

Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of loosely connected short stories which examine
the art of fiction writing, among other things, and seem to undermine the conventional and
predictable nature of fiction.
In the fourteen stories, Barth presents a literary "funhouse," a dense maze that weaves in
and out of plot, narration, and a self-conscious attention to the process of writing itself.