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.
"Mr. Barth breathes life into his prose in a wholly original way.
He baits us on laughter and lands us on disaster . . . We may be
seeing here the emergence of a new genre--the serious farce." --The
Massachusetts Review
"Much of The End of the Road has an unnerving power, due primarily
to the spectacle of intellectual lunacy . . . Barth is a graft of
Thorne Smith on Dostoevsky." --David Kerner, The Chicago Review
"That rarity of U.S. letters--a true novel of ideas." --TIME
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