1930–2024 · American postmodern novelist and professor
John Barth was an American novelist born in Cambridge, Maryland, best known for postmodern and metafictional fiction — books that keep one eye on the machinery of storytelling itself. The End of the Road (1958) was his second novel, following The Floating Opera (1956); his most celebrated work came in the 1960s with The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy and Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera shared the 1973 National Book Award for Fiction. He taught for decades, retiring from Johns Hopkins in 1995, and died in Florida in 2024 at 93.