2024-04-03 08:56:46
by Culture Editorial Staff
The American author was 93 years old. He was an advocate of metafiction and a supporter of new linguistic approaches. In 1973 he won the National Book Award with «Chimera». Among the titles translated into Italy: «The end of the road» and «The Maryland farmer»
Among the progenitors of postmodern fiction, the American writer John Bart died on April 2 in a retirement home in Bonita Springs, Florida; he was 93 years old. His wife Shelly Barth made the announcement to the New York Times and Johns Hopkins University, where Barth was professor emeritus of English literature and creative writing.
Born May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Maryland; Barth studied at the Juilliard art school in New York as a jazz drummer (he dreams of becoming an arranger); then he studied journalism at Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 1952. He was a professor at Pennsylvania State University; at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Johns Hopkins. Then he retires from teaching.
Author of 17 novels and collections of short stories, his writing is imbued with linguistic experiments and metafiction (a form of literary fiction that emphasizes its own artificiality, continually reminding the reader that he is reading a work of fiction). As a writer he made his debut in 1956 with L’Opera Galleggiante (Longanesi, 1968; Bompiani, 1996; minimum fax, 2003, 2018, 2022; among the finalists of the National Book Award), followed by La fine della strada in 1958 (Rizzoli, 1966; Bur Rizzoli, 1976; minimum fax, 2004), titles in which he addresses controversial topics such as suicide and abortion. In 1973 he won the National Book Award with Chimera for fiction ex aequo with Augustus by John Williams.
In 1960 he then published The Maryland Cultivator (Rizzoli, 1968), an epic-satirical novel which deals with the theme of the colonization of Maryland and which is based on the life of the poet Ebenezer Cook. This is the title that brought him notoriety as one of the most innovative new writers in the United States, at the time compared to names such as Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. In 1966 he published Giles the goat-boy (Rizzoli, 1972), a novel set in an imaginary mega-university, a metaphor for the entire world in the Cold War era.
Barth was part of a wave of writers who questioned linguistic and plot standards in the 1960s, championing postmodernism in literature and asserting the declining importance of the novel as a literary form. He dedicated the essay The Literature of Exhaustion to this theme. He was among the authors who influenced David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), whose long story Westward the Empire Runs Its Course (1989) draws inspiration from Barth’s The House of Mirth (1968).
April 3, 2024 (modified April 3, 2024 | 11:11)
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