1930–2024 · American novelist · Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University
John Barth (27 May 1930 – 2 April 2024) was an American writer known for postmodern and metafictional fiction — The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968) — who shared the 1973 National Book Award for Fiction for Chimera (Wikipedia ↗). He also spent twenty-two years teaching in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, which is precisely why the sentence is so strange in his hands: the essay it comes from was a defence of creative-writing programs, and Barth set the line down only to summarise a position he was about to argue against (Louis Menand, The New Yorker ↗). He wrote the words; he did not hold the view.