John Barth
The innovative postmodernist novelist and Johns Hopkins emeritus professor set many of his works on the Eastern Shore
John Barth, the playfully erudite author whose darkly comic and complicated novels revolved around the art of literature and launched countless debates over the art of fiction, died Tuesday at a hospice facility in Bonita Springs, Florida. He was 93.
The Johns Hopkins University, where Barth was a professor emeritus of English and creative writing, confirmed his death in a statement.
Along with William Gass, Stanley Elkin and other peers, Barth was part of a wave of writers in the 1960s who challenged standards of language and plot. The author of 20 books including “Giles Goat-Boy” and “The Sot-Weed Factor,” Barth was a college writing instructor who advocated for postmodernism to literature, saying old forms were used up and new approaches were needed.
Barth’s passion for literary theory and his innovative but complicated novels made him a writer’s writer. Barth said he felt like Scheherazade in “The Thousand and One Nights,” desperately trying to survive by creating literature.
He created a bestseller in 1966 with “Giles GoatBoy,” which turned a college campus into a microcosm of a world threatened by the Cold War, and made a hero of a character who is part goat.
The following year, he wrote a postmodern manifesto, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” which argued that the traditional novel suffered from a “used-upness of certain forms.” The influential Atlantic Monthly essay described the postmodern writer as one who “confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work.”
He clarified in another essay 13 years later, “The Literature of Replenishment,” that he didn’t mean the novel was dead — just sorely in need of a new approach.
“I like to remind misreaders of my earlier essay that written literature is in fact about 4,500 years old (give or take a few centuries depending on one’s definition of literature), but that
we have no way of knowing whether 4,500 years constitutes senility, maturity, youth, or mere infancy,” Barth wrote.
Barth frequently explored the relationship between storyteller and audience in parodies and satire. He said he was inspired by “The Thousand and One Nights,” which he discovered while working in Hopkins’ classics library.
“It is a quixotic high-wire act to hope, at this late hour of the century, to write literary material and contend with declining readership and a publishing world where businesses are owned by other businesses,” Barth told The Associated Press in 1991.
His first novel, “The Floating Opera,” was nominated for a National Book Award. He was nominated again for a 1968 short story collection, “Lost in the Funhouse,” and won in 1973 for “Chimera,” three short novels focused on myth.
His breakthrough work was 1960’s “The Sot-Weed Factor,” a parody of historical fiction with a multitude of plot twists and ribald hijinks. The sprawling, picaresque story uses 18th-century literary conventions to chronicle the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke, who takes possession of a tobacco farm in Maryland.
Barth also challenged literary conventions in his 1979 epistolary novel “Letters,” in which characters from his first six novels wrote to each other, and he inserted himself as a character as well.
Barth kept writing in the 21st century.
In 2008, he published “The Development,” a collection of short stories about retirees in a gated community. “Final Fridays,” published in 2012, was his third collection of nonfiction essays.
John Simmons Barth was born to John Jacob and Georgia (Simmons) Barth in Cambridge in Dorchester County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Barth’s 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 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 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.”
Barth graduated from Hopkins in 1951 and earned a master’s degree there the next year. Over the years, he taught at Penn State University, SUNY Buffalo, Boston University and Hopkins.
He 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.
Barth often sailed in the Chesapeake Bay, as did characters in his 1982 “Sabbatical: A Romance” and his 1987 “The Tidewater Tales.”
He regularly played the drums with a neighborhood jazz band in Baltimore.
He told The New York Times 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.”