Barth, John (Simmons)

Barth, John [Simmons] (1930–), Maryland‐born novelist, educated at Johns Hopkins, whose fiction set on the Eastern Shore of his native state includes The Floating Opera (1956), the experiences of a man recalled on the day in 1937 when he debates suicide, and The End of the Road (1958), another existential and nihilistic view of experience set in a travestied conventional love triangle. Although placed in the same setting, his third novel, The Sot‐Weed Factor (1960), is more fantastic and funnier in its lusty parody of an 18th‐century picaresque tale re‐creating the life and times of Ebenezer Cooke. This was followed by Giles Goat‐Boy (1966), another lengthy, complex, and comic novel full of ingenious parody in its satirical allegory of the modern world conceived in terms of a university campus. Lost in the Funhouse (1968) consists of 14 pieces of fiction related in part by their concern with what happens when a writer writes (he makes himself a persona) and a reader reads. Chimera (1972) is also a volume of short fiction, retelling in elaborate style tales of Scheherazade, Perseus, and Bellerophon dealing with social and psychological problems of modern life, also introducing the author Barth along the way. The last‐named work won a National Book Award. Barth returned to the long novel in Letters (1979), an unusual development of epistolary fiction, in which seven more or less parallel narratives are revealed through correspondence written by seven characters from his earlier fiction, including the author himself as just another imaginary figure, the intricate story comprising an inquiry into the patterns into which the characters have been previously set and the degree of freedom they may possess. Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) tells of the adventures and ideas occasioned by a long cruise of a college professor and her husband, an aspiring novelist. The Friday Book (1984) collects essays and other nonfiction. The Tidewater Tales (1987) is a lengthy novel about a novelist who claims he cannot write a projected novel as he and his wife sail full of friction around Chesapeake Bay. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) probes the connections between memory and reality in a postmodern style of narration. Once Upon a Time (1994) is another novel in which sailing is a central metaphor, and Coming Soon! (2001) reprises the conceit of the floating opera. Recent collections of short fiction are On With the Story (1996) and The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004).