John Barth

John Barth, called "Jack", was born in Cambridge, Maryland. He has an older brother, Bill and a twin sister Jill. In 1947 he graduated from Cambridge High School, where he played drums and wrote for the school newspaper. He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952. His thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus, drew on his experiences at Johns Hopkins.

Barth married Harriet Anne Strickland on January 11, 1950. He published two short stories that same year, one in Johns Hopkins's student literary magazine and one in The Hopkins Review. His daughter, Christine Ann, was born in the summer of 1951. His son, John Strickland, was born the following year.

Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965, where he met his second and current wife, Shelly Rosenberg. His third child, Daniel Stephen, was born in 1954. During the "American high Sixties," he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York 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.

Barth later taught at Boston University as a visiting professor in 1972–73 and at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until retiring in 1995