His sprawling and boisterous novel “The Sot-Weed Factor,” published in 1960, projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative write

John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling’s Limits, Dies at 93

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-03 01:00:05

His sprawling and boisterous novel “The Sot-Weed Factor,” published in 1960, projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers.

John Barth, who, believing that the old literary conventions were exhausted, extended the limits of storytelling with imaginative and intricately woven novels like “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died on Tuesday. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by Rachel Wallach, who works in communications at Johns Hopkins University, where Mr. Barth was an emeritus professor of English and creative writing. She said she did not have further details.

Mr. Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.

He followed up with another major work, “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966), which he summarized as a story “about a young man who is raised as a goat, who later learns he’s human and commits himself to the heroic project of discovering the secret of things.” It was also an erudite and satirical parable of the Cold War, in which campuses of a divided university confronted each other in hostility and mutual deterrence.