John Barth

John Barth, born in 1930, American writer, whose sprawling allegorical novels, employing fantasy, ribald humor, and satiric wit, are actually built around serious themes of existentialism. John Simmons Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and educated at Johns Hopkins University. His first novel, The Floating Opera (1956), concerns a nihilist (see Nihilism) who can find no reason for suicide. His book The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a long burlesque both of formal history and the picaresque novel, is also a parody of its own creation.

In Barth's best-received novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), the central image is the world conceived as an enormous computer-run university. Barth's other works include Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1968); Chimera (1972), three novellas that attempt to relate mythology to contemporary life; Letters (1979), a comic epic about modern life; Sabbatical: A Romance (1982); The Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987); The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991); and Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994), an autobiographical novel. The Friday Book (1984) and Further Fridays (1995) are collections of Barth's essays and other nonfictional writing.