John Barth, novelist, 1930-2024

John Barth made his name in the 1960s and ’70s as one of the leading practitioners of what came to be called “postmodern” fiction, but he had not always wanted to be a novelist.

The sense of literary vocation arrived late — as it often does for American writers. “Boys and girls [in the US] don’t grow up thinking, ‘I’m going to be a writer’,” he once said, “the way we’re told Flaubert did.”

Initially, Barth, who has died at the age of 93, harboured musical ambitions. He played the drums and imagined himself one day becoming a big band arranger, “a chap who takes someone else’s melody and turns it to his purpose”.

He briefly attended the Juilliard conservatory in New York, but quickly recognised that, for all his “amateur’s flair”, he did not have what it would take to make it as a professional musician. Casting around for “something else to do”, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “There I found myself writing stories.”

John Simmons Barth was born in Cambridge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1930, into what he described as a “fairly unsophisticated family”. His native region, which he said retained a “very ‘Deep South’ ethos”, was the setting for several of his novels, including his first, The Floating Opera, published in 1956, and for which he was nominated for a National Book Award.

He was educated in the public school system before going to Johns Hopkins, from where he graduated with a master’s degree in 1952.

While an undergraduate, and in order to offset some of his tuition costs, Barth took a part-time job as a shelf-stacker in the university’s classics library. It was here, as much as in seminars in the writing, speech and drama department, that his literary education properly began.

The novels he would go on to write, often involving what one critic has called “rococo parodies of antique literary forms”, bear the imprint of the many hours he spent haunting the stacks. For what he learnt to appreciate there was not the exploration of character but, as he put it, “the mere mass of the narrative”.

His lodestars were Homer’s Odyssey, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and “genre-busting marvels” such as Gargantua and Pantagruel by the French Renaissance author François Rabelais, and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. (Later he would develop a strong and enduring affinity for the work of mid-20th-century luminaries such as Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.)

A second novel, The End of the Road, appeared in 1958. But it was in The Sot-Weed Factor, published in 1960, that Barth patented the antic facsimile of 18th-century picaresque, often overlaid with metafictional game-playing, that would lead him to be associated with other postmodernist writers such as William Gass, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon.

By this time, Barth, who had married Anne Strickland 10 years earlier (they divorced in 1969), was teaching English and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University. He later confessed to some ambivalence about the very idea of teaching creative writing (“God knows if we should be doing it in the universities at all”), though he was a gifted “coach”, as he preferred to call himself. A former student of his remembered: “One of the delights of sitting in his classroom was hearing him X-ray a story, finding its hidden bone structure and energy source.”

Among the “energy sources” of Barth’s own fiction were old literary conventions, such as the epistolary novel (he was an admirer of Henry Fielding) or classical myth, which he repurposed for his own ends — rather as the jazz arranger he once aspired to be would take “received melody lines” and then reorchestrate them.

The writer moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1965, amid the tumult of “America’s High Sixties”, where, he later recalled, “artistic experiment was in the air”. While there, he wrote one of his most formally adventurous works, Lost in the Funhouse, a collection of short stories “for print, tape [and] live voice”.

In 1973, Barth returned to Johns Hopkins, his alma mater, as a professor. He continued to publish steadily, both fiction (by the end of his life he had published 17 novels and collections of stories) and criticism.

In both modes, his guiding principle was one he took from Henry James: “To be interesting in one beautiful sentence after another. To be interesting; not to change the world.” Jonathan Derbyshire