John Barth (1930-2024), Master of Metafiction

John Barth (1930-2024), who died on April 2, 2024 at the age of 93, was America’s leading writer of metafictional and post-modern fiction. This interview was conducted by Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff on November 12, 2001 in the KPFA studios, while on the book tour for the novel Coming Soon.

John Barth began to receive notice for his two earliest novels, The Floating Opera and End of the Road in the late 1950s, but burst on the scene with his epic comic novel about colonial life in Maryland, The Sot-Weed Factor, and his allegory of the Cold War, set on a university campus, Giles Goat-Boy. His short story collection, Lost in the Funhouse and novella collection Chimera cemented his reputation as a writer of meta-fiction, as the stories zoom back on themselves and on the writing of those stories.

From Wikipedia: “In his epistolary novel LETTERS (1979), Barth corresponds with characters from his other books. Later novels such as The Tidewater Tales (1987) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) continue in the metafictional vein, using writers as protagonists who interact with their own and other stories in elaborate ways. His 1994 Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera casts Barth himself as the protagonist who on a sailing trip encounters characters and situations from previous works.”

After the 2001 interview, he continued to work in the same vein with a triptych of novellas, Where Three Roads Meet in 2005, interrelated short stories set in a retirement community, The Development: Nine Stories in 2008, and Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons in 2011. A, book of collected stories was released in 2015 and Postscripts (or Just Desserts): Some Final Scribbling came out in 2022.

This interview was both the last interview conducted with Richard Lupoff as co-host (he would return later with a couple of guest co-host interviews), and the final interview recorded and edited on analog tape. This program was digitized and edited in July 2024 by Richard Wolinsky.

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