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John Barth, Writer Who Pushed

Storytelling’s Limits, Dies at 93
His sprawling and boisterous novel “The Sot-Weed Factor,” published in
1960, projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative
writers.

By Michael T. Kaufman and Dwight Garner

April 2, 2024

John Barth, who, believing that the old literary conventions were
exhausted, extended the limits of storytelling with imaginative and
intricately woven novels like “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,”
died on Tuesday at a hospice facility in Bonita Springs, Fla. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Shelly Barth. Before entering hospice
care, Mr. Barth had lived in the Bonita Bay neighborhood of Bonita Springs.

Mr. Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the
boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of
the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to
contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir
Nabokov.

He followed up with another major work, “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966), which he

summarized as a story “about a young man who is raised as a goat, who
later learns he’s human and commits himself to the heroic project of
discovering the secret of things.” It was also an erudite and satirical
parable of the Cold War, in which campuses of a divided university
confronted each other in hostility and mutual deterrence.

Mr. Barth was a practitioner and a theoretician of postmodern literature. In

1967, he wrote a critical essay for The Atlantic Monthly, “The Literature of
Exhaustion,” which continues to be cited as the manifesto of
postmodernism, and which has inspired decades of debate over its central
contention: that old conventions of literary narrative can be, and indeed
have been, “used up.”

As his foremost inspiration, Mr. Barth cited Scheherazade, the tale-spinning

enchantress who nightly wove stories to keep her master from executing
her at dawn. He said it was she who first bewitched him when he worked as
a page in the stacks of the Johns Hopkins University library in Baltimore as
an undergraduate.

From 1965 to 1973, Mr. Barth taught at the State University of New York at
Buffalo (now the University at Buffalo), where he was a member of a
renowned English department that also included the critic Leslie Fiedler.

Mr. Barth’s creative output was prodigious: He published nearly 20 novels

and collections of short stories, three books of critical essays and a final
book of short observational pieces. In his teaching and in his writing, he
stressed the force of narrative imagination in the face of death, or even just
boredom.

When the university was thrown into chaos by a long and shapeless
student upheaval in early 1970, Mr. Barth was asked by a young reporter
what the experience had taught him.
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In the Tidewater accent of his native Maryland, Mr. Barth acknowledged

that by temperament he was not likely to get involved in campus protests
and “the casuistries that people evolve.” He volunteered laconically that
what he had learned was that “the fact that the situation is desperate
doesn’t make it any more interesting.”

Mr. Barth was a distinctive presence. “He is a tall man with a domed
forehead; a pair of very large-rimmed spectacles give him a professorial,
owlish look,” George Plimpton wrote in the introduction to an interview he
conducted with Mr. Barth for The Paris Review in 1985. “He is a
caricaturist’s delight.”

“In manner,” Mr. Plimpton continued, “Barth has been described as a

combination of British officer and Southern gentleman.”

John Simmons Barth was born on May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Md., on
Chesapeake Bay, to John Jacob and Georgia (Simmons) Barth. His father
ran a candy store. He had a twin sister, Jill, who once told The Washington
Post that he had “gotten a lot of things without trying very hard at school.”
An older brother, William, said that as a child John “always had an
overactive imagination.” He added, “What amazes me is how he imagines
so much when he’s experienced so little.”
In high school Mr. Barth was drawn to music; he played drums in the
school band and hoped to become a jazz arranger. He was accepted to join a
summer program run by the Juilliard School in New York before enrolling
at Johns Hopkins.

“I found out very quickly in New York,” he said in a 2008 interview, “that
the young man to my right and the young woman to my left were going to
be the real professional musicians of their generation, and that what I had
hoped was a pre-professional talent was really just an amateur flair.”

Mr. Barth graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1951 and received a master’s
degree there the next year. He taught at Pennsylvania State University
from 1953 to 1965.

His first published novel, “The Floating Opera” (1956), was narrated by a
character who considers killing himself out of existential boredom before
realizing that this choice would be as meaningless as any other. In 1969, Mr.
Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” an experimental collection of short stories,
was a finalist for the National Book Award. He won the award in 1973 for
“Chimera,” another collection.

After the publication of “The End of the Road,” a campus novel filled with
parodies of psychiatric and academic jargon, in 1958, Mr. Barth set out in a
new and less realistic direction with “The Sot-Weed Factor,” a huge
picaresque written in neo-Elizabethan style and laden with puns. It tells the
story of Ebenezer Cooke, the “sot-weed factor” (tobacco peddler) of the
title, who travels through a sinful late-17th-century world with his twin
sister and his tutor, struggling to maintain his virtue.

“The book is a bare-knuckled satire of humanity at large and the grandiose

costume romance,” Edmund Fuller wrote in a review in The New York
Times, “done with meticulous skill in an imitation of such 18th-century
picaresque novelists as Fielding, Smollett and Sterne.”

He added, “For all the vigor of these models, we have to go back to Rabelais
to match its unbridled bawdiness and scatological mirth.”

“The Sot-Weed Factor” was, Time

magazine said, “that rare literary
creation: a genuinely serious
comedy.”
Doubleday

Mr. Fiedler, Mr. Barth’s colleague in Buffalo, said “The Sot-Weed Factor”
was “closer to the Great American Novel than any other book of the last
decade.” Time magazine called it “that rare literary creation: a genuinely
serious comedy.”

Mr. Barth took another gamble with his next book, saying it would be “a
souped-up Bible.”

“What I really wanted to write after ‘The Sot-Weed Factor’ was a new Old
Testament, a comic Old Testament,” he told an interviewer.
What emerged was “Giles Goat-Boy,” the story of a young man who, having
recognized that he is human and not a goat, seeks to promote moral
conduct on the west campus of a university and redeem its student body by
reprogramming a computer, WESCAC, that dominates that portion of the
campus, even while the machine is in a dangerous standoff with the equally
threatening EASCAC, a deus ex machina that controls life on the east
campus.

The book was generally received with enthusiasm and won Mr. Barth new
admirers. But it was also criticized for what some called its artifice and
contrivance. While Newsweek said it “confirms Barth’s standing as perhaps
the most prodigally gifted comic novelist writing in English today,” Michael
Dirda, writing in The Washington Post, called it “more than a little
overwrought and too clever by half.”

The criticism would continue. Writing in The Times in 1982, Michiko

Kakutani noted that over the years Mr. Barth had been “praised, on the one
hand, for creating daring, innovative texts” and “damned, on the other, by
critics as disparate as John Gardner and Gore Vidal, for substituting high-
tech literary gimmicks for real characters and moral passion.”

Mr. Barth was clearly sensitive to such views and seemingly addressed
them in one of his best-known statements: “My feeling about technique in
art is that it has the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say,
heartfelt ineptitude has its charm and so has heartless skill, but what you
really want is passionate virtuosity.”

He defended his use of postmodern devices like jokes, irony and

exaggeration to punctuate, comment on, and even ridicule and undermine a
narrative. Such techniques, he insisted, provided the tools to replenish and
build on what he considered to be the moribund realism of the 19th-century
novel.

When an interviewer for Bookforum asked him in 2004 if he read his

reviews, Mr. Barth replied: “Oh, sure. As I used to tell my apprentices, what
you want most of all is intelligent praise. If you can’t have intelligent praise,
you’ll take stupid praise. If you can’t have stupid praise, then the third-best
thing is intelligent criticism. And, of course, the worst thing is stupid
criticism.”
 Mr. Barth in 2015. “My feeling about technique in art,” he once said, “is that it has the
same value as technique in lovemaking.” Nancy Crampton
He especially disliked it when he was accused of writing spoofs. He once
told Esquire magazine that the word “spoof” sounded like imperfectly
suppressed flatulence.

Mr. Barth often tinkered with his own work and prepared revised editions
of many of his books. One of his novels, “Letters” (1979), consisted of letters
to and from the characters of his earlier novels. He revisited the essay “The
Literature of Exhaustion” in another essay, written in 1980, titled “The
Literature of Replenishment.” His “Tidewater Tales: A Novel” (1987) was
conceived as a mirror-image twin to “Sabbatical: A Romance,” published
five years earlier. Both dealt with couples on a sailboat trip, but with key
characters making opposite life choices.

Mr. Barth’s novel “Coming Soon!!!” (2001) was a riff on his first book, “The
Floating Opera.” It concerned a writing competition between an aging
writer identified only as the “novelist emeritus” and a student at the Johns
Hopkins writing department, where Mr. Barth had taught from 1973 to 1995.

As he grew older, so did his characters. “The Development” (2008) was a

set of linked stories about the elderly residents of a gated community called
Heron Bay Estates. There were toga parties and high spirits in these
stories, but also pain and loss. One story was titled “Assisted Living,”
another “The End.”

His last book, a collection of short nonfiction pieces, “Postscripts,” was

published in 2022.

Mr. Barth married Harriette Anne Strickland in 1950. They had three
children, Christine, John and Daniel, and divorced in 1969. He married
Shelly I. Rosenberg in 1970. In addition to her, he is survived by his
children.

Mr. Barth often sailed in the Chesapeake, as did many of his characters. He
regularly played the drums with a neighborhood jazz band in Baltimore.

He confided to Ms. Kakutani that his experience in the world at large had
been somewhat limited. He said he had “led a serene, tranquil and
absolutely non-Byronic life.”
Michael T. Kaufman, a former Times editor and correspondent, died in 2010. Alex Traub and Orlando
Mayorquín contributed reporting.

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at
the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: John Barth, Writer Who
Pushed Storytelling’s Limits, Is Dead at 93