John Barth

Barth grew up in Cambridge, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a flat tidewater landscape of creeks and crab boats that recurs, transfigured, throughout his fiction; he studied at Juilliard briefly as a jazz drummer before switching to English at Johns Hopkins, where he first encountered the Arabian Nights frame-tale structure that would obsess him for the rest of his career.

After two earnest early realist novels, The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy blew the form wide open with sprawling, self-aware parody; Lost in the Funhouse pushed the same instincts into short fiction, opening with a story literally printed as a Möbius strip to be read in an endless loop. Chimera, reworking Scheherazade and Greek myth into fiction about fiction-making itself, shared the 1973 National Book Award with John Williams's Augustus.

He taught for decades at Johns Hopkins, mentoring generations of writers who absorbed postmodernism through his classroom as much as his novels, and kept publishing into his eighties. He died in 2024 at ninety-three.