John Barth

John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the "American high Sixties," he moved to teach at SUNY/Buffalo from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know "the remarkable short fiction" of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse.

He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995.

Barth's work is characterized by an historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: "I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [...] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time." In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device.

JB in Romanian Magazin Dilemateca

Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay and the sympathetic characterization and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.