An aspiring musician before realizing he had, by his own estimation, only “an amateur’s flair,” John Barth borrowed from his musical past when he turned to writing fiction that established him in the 1960s as one of the country’s most important writers.
“What I hoped to be eventually was an orchestrator — what in those days was called an arranger,” he said in a Paris Review interview, published in 1985, of his beginnings as a drummer. “An arranger is a chap who takes someone else’s melody and turns it to his purpose. For better or worse, my career as a novelist has been that of an arranger.”
Long considered one of the luminaries of the postmodern literary movement, Mr. Barth was 93 when he died Tuesday in a Bonita Springs, Fla., hospice facility, his wife, Shelly Barth, told The New York Times.
A National Book Award finalist for his 1968 short story collection, “Lost in the Funhouse,” he won in 1973 for “Chimera,” a trio of interrelated novellas that retold the mythical stories of Perseus, Bellerophon, and Scheherazade.
In 1966, he published “Giles Goat-Boy” — an unusual if not completely unlikely best-seller that, like many of Mr. Barth’s books, defied easy summarization and led critics to offer descriptions that echoed the comic complexities of his writing.
The novel was “a bonkers Cold War allegory that draws from the Bible, ‘Oedipus Rex,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ and ‘Ulysses,’ among other works,” Dave Kim wrote in a New York Times appreciation of Mr. Barth’s career.
In the book, “a bitterly divided college campus is overrun by a tyrannical computer system called WESCAC,” Kim wrote, “and the only one who can save humanity is a boy named George Giles, who was raised as a goat and somehow turns out to be the offspring of WESCAC and a virgin named Lady Creamhair. (It’s great.)”
Mr. Barth began his publishing career with “The Floating Opera” (1956) and “The End of the Road” (1958), two novels that were more conventionally structured. With 1960′s “The Sot-Weed Factor” he left convention behind.
That novel drew comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov. At about 800 pages and heavily seeded with puns, the novel was written in Elizabethan style. Mr. Barth told the story of Ebenezer Cooke — the “sot-weed factor,” or tobacco merchant, of the title — who traveled through a sinful late-17th-century world with his twin sister and his tutor while struggling to maintain his virtue.
A twin himself, Mr. Barth went by the nickname Jack. His twin sister was named Jill.
Mr. Barth’s “fascination with themes of twinship springs from that biological fact rather than theories of multiple identity and fiction,” Boston Globe book critic Robert Taylor wrote in 1984.
Accomplished in a wide range of writing, Mr. Barth published novels and short stories and essays such as “The Literature of Exhaustion,” an oft-cited treatise that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1967.
He collected his nonfiction in books that, as the subtitle of 2012′s “Final Fridays” noted, included essays, lectures, and tributes.
In 1979, Mr. Barth spoke with a Globe reporter at his summer residence on Lake Chautauqua, in western New York State.
He had lived in Greater Boston twice: first in 1971, while on sabbatical from teaching at what was then the State University of New York at Buffalo, and again as a visiting professor at Boston University, in 1972 and ‘73, when his colleagues included the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton.
In a description that could have been an anecdote in one of his stories, Mr. Barth recalled that in 1971, he and his wife, Shelly (“an incorrigible Bostonian from Philadelphia”), lived on a street behind Radcliffe College “in a building famous for murders in its laundry room, in an apartment subleased from a professor at MIT. He had several locks on the doors and the most menacing library I’ve ever seen. I used his library a lot.”
In that apartment Mr. Barth began writing his award-winning “Chimera.”
He was an avid sailor, but ultimately “the jam-packedness” of Massachusetts helped drive him back to Maryland. Even the waters were crowded.
“Sailing out of beautiful Marblehead is like negotiating the Southeast Expressway,” he told the Globe. “Finding a random overnight anchorage is like looking for a parking space in Harvard Square.”
The couple returned to Boston in 1972 for his visiting professorship at BU – a stop on his academia career that brought him from Pennsylvania State University (1953 to 1965) to the State University of New York at Buffalo (’65 to 1973) and finally to his alma matter, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (’73 to 1995).
In its tribute, Johns Hopkins praised Mr. Barth for his “exacting and generous teaching,” though he told the Globe he much preferred writing to the classroom.
“Teaching I could give up tomorrow, if that were possible at no great cost to my standard of living and my financial security,” he said in 1979. “I’d miss it, but not painfully.”
Nevertheless, he added, “I regard myself as extraordinarily lucky, amazingly lucky, to be able to spend my life doing the thing I’m best at, and which gives me the most satisfaction.”
John Simmons Barth was born on May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Md., to John Jacob Barth, who ran a candy store, and Georgia Simmons Barth.
He played the drums in a local jazz group and briefly studied at The Juilliard School in New York City.
“Nearly every writer I know was going to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of passionate default,” he told The Paris Review.
Upon realizing he only had “an amateur’s flair” in music, he went to Johns Hopkins “to find something else to do.” That turned out to be writing.
“I think that my experience is not uncommon: You decide to be a violinist, you decide to be a sculptor or a painter, but you find yourself being a novelist,” he said.
Mr. Barth graduated from Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in 1951 and a master’s the following year, paying part of his tuition with money earned shelving books in a campus library – a rudimentary job that helped further his education.
“One was more or less encouraged to take a cart of books and go back into the stacks and not come out for seven or eight hours. So I read what I was filing,” he said, and some of those writers, such as Homer and Virgil, became his “great teachers.”
In turn, his impact on younger writers extended beyond the classrooms he inhabited during more than four decades as a teacher.
“He showed us how writing works by letting us peer into its machinery, and reminded us that our experience of the world will always be dictated by the instruments we have to observe and record it,” Kim wrote of Mr. Barth. “While never abandoning narrative, he found endless joy in picking apart its elements, and in the process helped define a postwar American style.”
Mr. Barth married Harriette Anne Strickland in 1950, and they had three children, Christine, John, and Daniel. Their marriage ended in divorce.
In 1970, he married Shelly Rosenberg, who survives him, as do his children, according to The New York Times.
Having been inspired by those classic texts he read while shelving them, Mr. Barth told the Associated Press in 1991 that “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.”
A hunt-and-peck typist, he avoided keyboards and wrote much of his work longhand.
“There’s a nice flow that probably makes both the sentences and stories longer than they should be,” he told the Globe, and besides, “the sound of the typewriter bothers me. I can’t imagine anything except the sound of pens and pencils going across the paper.”
Material from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press was used in this report. Bryan Marquard of the Globe staff contributed.