John Simmons Barth (natural May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

John Barth was innate inside Cambridge, Maryland and briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, receiving the B.The. around 1951 and an M.A. around 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus).

He was the prof at Penn State University (1953-1965), SUNY Buffalo (1965-1973), Boston University (visiting professor, 1972-1973), & Johns Hopkins University (1973-1995) before he retired within 1995.

Barth began his career using The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short novels that dealt wittily sustaining controversial topics, suicide & abortion severally. It were straightforward tales; when Barth late remarked, using gentle condescension, it "didn't know they were novels".

The Sot-Weed Factor was a literary quantum jump, an 800-report mock epos of the colonisation of Maryland according to an actual poet, Ebenezer Cook, who wrote the verse form of that title. The Sot-Weed Factor was what Northrop Frye called an anatomy — the large, loosely structured function, by owning digressions, distractions, stories inside stories, & lists (like a prolonged exchange of insulting terms by ii woman of the street). A fancied Ebenezer Cooke (repeatedly described when "poet and virgin") occurs as Candide-like inexperienced person world health organization sets intent on write a heroic epos & is disillusioned plenty that the final verse form occurs as biting irony.

Barth's next book, Giles Goat-Boy, of comparable size, wwhen a speculative fiction according to the conceit of the university as universe. It can be described as a fictitious gospel astir a half-human half-goat world health organization discovers his humanity & becomes the savior within a university that allegorically is the universe, presented as a computer tape given to John Barth, world health organization denies that these are his function, preceded by an alleged note from either the publisher to the symptom that Barth really did write it. In the course of the book, Giles carries out all the tasks prescribed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Barth saved a listing of the tasks taped to his wall when he was writing the book.

A short story collection Lost in the Funhouse and the novelette collection Chimera were even supplementary metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding a writing run & presenting accomplishment like vii nested quotations. Letters was yet a second tour de click, where Barth & a characters of his foremost six books interacted.

When writing people books, Barth was too pondering & discussing a theoretical problems of fiction writing, virtually all notably around an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1st printed in the Atlantic, 1967), that was widely considered to be the statement of "the death of the novel". Barth has since insisted that he was just making clear that the particular stage within history was passing, & pointing to imaginable directions from either there. He afterwards (1979) wrote a watch-higher essay, "The Literature of Replenishment", to clarify a point.

His fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodernist self-consciousness & pun on one h&, & the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting unremarkably ascribed to thomas more traditional genres & subgenres of classic & coeval storytelling.

Selected Works
Fiction
The Floating Opera (1957) The End of the Road (1958) The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Giles Goat-Boy (1966) Lost in the Funhouse (short stories) (1968) Chimera (three linked novelette) (1972) Letters (1979) Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) Tidewater Tales (1987) The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) Once upon a Time (1994) On with the Story (short stories) (1996) Coming Soon! (2001) The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (short stories) (2004)

Nonfiction
The Friday Book (1984) Further Fridays (1995)