Biography

He published in 1950 two short stories, one in Johns Hopkins's student literary magazine and one in The Hopkins Review.

Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that "The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less."[.

Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short realist novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. They are straightforward, realistic tales; as Barth later remarked, they "didn't know they were novels".

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974.

In 1965, he moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know "the remarkable short fiction" of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse.