Novelist John Barth, the innovative postmodernism dead, aged 93

John Barth, the playfully erudite author whose darkly funny and complex books centered on the art of literature and sparked innumerable disputes about the art of fiction, died Tuesday. He was ninety-three.  

In a statement, Johns Hopkins University, where Barth held the position of emeritus professor of creative writing and English, acknowledged his death.  

Barth, along with colleagues like Stanley Elkins and William Gass, was a part of a literary movement in the 1960s that questioned conventional wisdom on language and story structure. Author of 20 books, including "Giles Goat-Boy" and "The Sot-Weed Factor," Barth promoted postmodernism in literature, arguing that traditional forms had reached their limit and that fresh ideas were required. Barth taught writing at a university.  

Barth’s passion for literary theory and his innovative but complicated novels made him a writer’s writer. Barth said he felt like Scheherazade in “The Thousand and One Nights,” desperately trying to survive by creating literature. 

He created a best-seller in 1966 with "Giles Goat-Boy," which turned a college campus into a microcosm of a world threatened by the Cold War, and made a hero of a character who is part goat. 

The following year, he wrote a postmodern manifesto, "The Literature of Exhaustion," which argued that the traditional novel suffered from a "used-upness of certain forms." The influential Atlantic Monthly essay described the postmodern writer as one who "confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work." 

He clarified in another essay 13 years later, "The Literature of Replenishment," that he didn't mean the novel was dead just sorely in need of a new approach. 

“I like to remind misreaders of my earlier essay that written literature is in fact about 4,500 years old (give or take a few centuries depending on one’s definition of literature), but that we have no way of knowing whether 4,500 years constitutes senility, maturity, youth, or mere infancy,” Barth wrote. 

Barth frequently explored the relationship between storyteller and audience in parodies and satire. He said he was inspired by “The Thousand and One Nights,” which he discovered while working in the classics library of Johns Hopkins University. 

“It is a quixotic high-wire act to hope, at this late hour of the century, to write literary material and contend with declining readership and a publishing world where businesses are owned by other businesses,” Barth told The Associated Press in 1991. 

"The Floating Opera," his debut book, received a National Book Award nomination. His 1968 book of short stories, "Lost in the Funhouse," earned him another nomination. In 1973, he took home the prize for "Chimera," a compilation of three myth-focused short stories. 

Barth set many of his works at the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he was born. Couples sailing on the Chesapeake Bay are the subject of his 1982 work "Sabbatical: A Romance" and his 1987 work "The Tidewater Tales". 

In addition to challenging literary conventions, Barth included himself as a character in his 1979 epistolary novel "Letters," which featured letters between characters from his first six works.