John Barth
In 1973, John Barth shared the National Book Award for Fiction for his episodic novel Chimera — recognition that placed him firmly among the leading novelists writing in English at the time.
Born on May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Barth attended the Juilliard School before going on to study at Johns Hopkins University. He built a career as both a novelist and a university teacher, working in English throughout his writing life. His fiction earned him a reputation substantial enough to bring further institutional recognition: he received the PEN/Malamud Award and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The teaching side of his career ran alongside his writing, and the two roles appear to have occupied him in parallel rather than in sequence.
Barth died on April 2, 2024, in Bonita Springs, at the age of ninety-three. The National Book Award he co-received for Chimera in 1973 remains one of the more concrete markers of how his work was received during his lifetime.
Quotes by John Barth
John Barth's insights on:
When you’re lost, the smartest thing to do is stay put till you’re found, hollering if necessary.
Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she’d see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her... and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.
The transaction will enable us to become a single source of integrated products and services that building owners want in order to optimize comfort and energy efficiency.
What I’ve learned is that the muses’ decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose – they will sing or not, regardless.
Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.
To realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and becomes a saint, a cynic or a suicide on principle, one hasn’t reasoned completely. The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet’s question is, absolutely, meaningless.
The nightsea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a shore that may not exist and couldn’t be reached if it did.
