John Simmons Barth

The Floating Opera is a novel by American writer John Barth, first published in 1956 and significantly revised in 1967. Barth's first published work, the existentialist and nihilist story is a first-person account of a day protagonist Todd Andrews contemplated suicide. Critics and Barth himself often pair The Floating …

The End of the Road is the second novel by American writer John Barth, published first in 1958, and then in a revised edition in 1967. The irony-laden black comedy's protagonist Jacob Horner suffers from a nihilistic paralysis he calls "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. As …

In CHIMERAJohn Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant,” Barth retells these …

Giles Goat-Boy is the fourth novel by American writer John Barth. It is metafictional comic novel in which the world is portrayed as a university campus in an elaborate allegory of the Cold War. Its title character is a human boy raised as a goat, who comes to believe he is the Grand Tutor, the predicted Messiah. The …

LETTERS is an epistolary novel by the American writer John Barth, published in 1979. It consists of a series of letters in which Barth and the characters of his other books interact. In addition to the Author and Germaine Pitt, the correspondents are: Todd Andrews, Jacob Horner, A.B. Cook, Jerome Bray and Ambrose …