John Barth
John Barth
Johns Hopkins University 1951
A native son of Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the holder of two degrees from Johns Hopkins University, novelist and short-story writer John Barth is recognized as one of the foremost American practitioners of post-modernist fiction.
Before devoting his life to the musical qualities of the English language, Barth studied music briefly at Juilliard. He came to Johns Hopkins in 1947, earning a BA in 1951 and an MA one year later, both from the university’s Arts & Sciences division. His master’s thesis was a novella titled The Shirt of Nessus. He remarked years later that he wasn’t terribly unhappy that copies of this early effort have proved difficult, if not impossible, to locate.
Literary success arrived in 1957 with Barth’s debut novel, The Floating Opera, followed the next year by The End of the Road. Both announced an unusual new voice in American letters, as Barth focused as much on the process of story-telling as on the story itself. He raised the stakes, and skewed the focus, even more with the ambitious works that followed: The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles Goat-Boy (1966), the short-story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and the novella collection Chimera (1972).
Not only a groundbreaking writer but a prolific one as well, Barth published 10 works of fiction after Chimera, including The Development in 2008. He is also the author of two nonfiction compilations, The Friday Book (1984) and Further Fridays (1995). What’s more, he accomplished this body of work while teaching writing at Penn State (1953-65), SUNY Buffalo (1965-73), Boston University (visiting professor, 1972-73), and finally his alma mater, where he was a professor in the renowned Writing Seminars Department from 1973 until his retirement from Johns Hopkins in 1995.
