- He published in 1950 two short stories, one in Johns Hopkins's student literary magazine and one in The Hopkins Review.
- Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that "The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less."[.
- Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short realist novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. They are straightforward, realistic tales; as Barth later remarked, they "didn't know they were novels".
- He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974.
- In 1965, he moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know "the remarkable short fiction" of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse.
- Barth later taught at Boston University as a visiting professor in 1972-73 and at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until he retired in 1995.
- John Barth was an American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction.
- In 1998 he received the "Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award".
- His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history, Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world, and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories.
- In 1947 he graduated from Cambridge High School, where he played drums and wrote for the school newspaper.
- From 1953 to 1965, Barth was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he met his second wife, Shelly Rosenberg.
- In 1967, he wrote a highly influential and, to some, controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a "used-up" tradition; Barth's description of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is "novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author".
- He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.
- His thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus, drew on his experiences at Johns Hopkins.
- He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952.
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