John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work.

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.

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two "realist" novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism.

Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy, is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. In the course of the novel Giles carries out all the tasks prescribed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Barth kept a list of the tasks taped to his wall while he was writing the book.

The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device.

Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay and the sympathetic characterization and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.

Novelists, Fiction Authors, Literary Award-Winning Author,