John Simmons Barth was an American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history; Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world; and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.

John Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1951 and composed The Shirt of Nessus, a thesis for a Magister Artium in 1952. He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short stories such as The Floating Opera, which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road, which tackles the controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."

The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, inspired Barth to write an eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland. Noted literary critic Northrop Frye called it an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions.