 |
 |
 |
|
New York, NY: Doubleday (1958)
First Edition.
Very Good in dust jacket.
Struck with a sudden case of “cosmopsis,” a nihilistic paralysis that occurs in those unable to act amid a sea of choice, Jacob Horner turns to the enigmatic, questionably credentialed Doctor for help. The Doctor prescribes Jake a series of therapeutic treatments, one of which involves his acquiring a teaching job at a local college. There, he finds himself entangled—intellectually, ethically, sexually—with an obsessively rationalist couple.
Traversing the 20th century philosophical canon, The End of the Road makes pitstops in logic, existentialism, and the philosophy of language as it tries to make sense of midcentury American man. With his “comedy of intellectual abstraction” (Thomas LeClair), Barth’s early novel of ideas takes hardline moral philosophy to the so-called end of the road.
John Barth is our most celebrated postmodernist. From the appearance in 1956 of The Floating Opera, his first published book, through the essay collection Final Fridays, released in 2012, he has published at least two books in each of the seven decades spanning his writerly life thus far. Thrice nominated for the National Book Award—The Floating Opera, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, which won in 1973—Barth has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he taught for twenty-two years in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He now lives in Florida with his wife Shelly.
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
