John Barth

From one of our most celebrated masters, a touching, comic, deeply humane collection of linked stories about surprising developments in a gated community I find myself inclined to set down for whomever, before my memory goes kaput altogether, some account of our little community, in particular of what Margie and I …

The Sot-Weed Factor is a 1960 novel by the American writer John Barth. The novel marks the beginning of Barth's literary postmodernism. The Sot-Weed Factor takes its title from the poem The Sotweed Factor, or A Voyage to Maryland, A Satyr by the English-born poet Ebenezer Cooke, of whom few biographical details are …

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor is a novel by American writer John Barth, published in 1991. It is a postmodern metafictional story of a man who jumps overboard a modern replica of a medieval Arab ship and is rescued by sailors from the world of Sinbad the Sailor. Eventually he makes his way to "Baghdad, the …

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 …