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John Barth is our most celebrated postmodernist. From the appearance in 1956 of The Floating Opera, his first published book, through the essay collection Final Fridays, released in 2012, he has published at least two books in each of the seven decades spanning his writerly life thus far. Thrice nominated for the National Book Award—The Floating Opera, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, which won in 1973—Barth has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he taught for twenty-two years in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He now lives in Florida with his wife Shelly.
Barth's earlier accomplishments amount to a watershed for the country's fiction, a landmark in what's known as Postmodernism. ... As Barth's work matures, its elements of experiment take us further from the ordinary. --John Domini, LitHub Every sentence he writes either looks at itself askance or ushers in a following sentence that will perform the task. In his fascinated commitment to the art--and to the criticism--of storytelling, he has no rival. --William Pritchard, New York Times John Barth has spent most of his allotted era watching our wheels spin with a coolly detached, not unamused gaze. He doesn't ignore or eschew change, but he takes a wider view. He is Heraclitean to the core. . . . If, as Nabokov wrote in the Afterword to Lolita, art is kindness, then John Barth embodies art every bit as much as anyone ever has. --James Greer, LA Review of Books
