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.