Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by John Barth (American Novelist)

John Simmons Barth (b.1930) is an American postmodern novelist and short-story writer. He is noted for complex, innovative experimental writing that spans seventeen works of fiction and three collections of nonfiction.

Born in Cambridge, Maryland, Barth attended Johns Hopkins University graduating with BA and MA degrees in creative writing in 1951 and 1953. He was a professional drummer before turning to literature and teaching. His earliest novels—The Floating Opera (1956,) End of the Road (1958,) The Sot-Weed Factor (1960,) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966)—combined realism, formidable learning, and fantastic humor. The essay The Literature of Exhaustion (1967) argued that fiction could not keep up with the rapidly changing face of the post-war world.

Barth’s later novels include Letters (1979,) Sabbatical (1982,) Tidewater Tales (1988,) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991.) His story collections include Lost in the Fun-House (1968) and Floating Opera and the End of the Road (1988.) Recent works include a novel about two writers racing to complete a book, Coming Soon!!! (2001,) the short story collection The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004,) and the three novellas in Where Three Roads Meet (2005.)

John Barth is considered one of the pioneers of metafiction (along with William H. Gass, William Gaddis, and John Hawkes): prose that self-consciously refers to its own storytelling and the writing process and whose form eclipses the importance of plot. Critical assessments include Stan Fogel and Gordon Slethaug’s Understanding John Barth (1990,) Charles B. Harris’s Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth (1983,) and Patricia Drechsel Tobin’s John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance (1992.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by John Barth

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
John Barth
Topics: Heroes, Heroism, Heroes/Heroism

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o’er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man’s gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel’s arse?
John Barth
Topics: Manners

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.
John Barth
Topics: Writing

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