John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, receiving a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus).

He was a professor at Penn State University (1953-1965), SUNY Buffalo (1965-1973), Boston University (visiting professor, 1972-1973), and Johns Hopkins University (1973-1995) before he retired in 1995.

The unorthodox psychotherapy of a genius-quack doctor guides bachelor Jacob Horner to a small college town where he reads the WORLD ALMANAC for divine inspiration and teaches grammar for behavior modification.It's the innocent 1950s,and his not-so-innocent seduction of Rennie Morgan, a colleague's wife,turns love into brilliant black comedy. When Jack and fellow professor Joe Morgan use philosophy to battle for intellectual and sexual domination over Rennie, bedroom farce moves into the Theatre of the Absurd. Desperation and tragedy ruffle the comic surface, and the extraordinary art of the author of THE SOT-WEED FACTOR and GILES GOAT-BOY once again turns parody into an inventive, thought-provoking novel of ideas.