As young Jake Horner’s mind became an increasingly paralyzing cobweb of dark thoughts, he turned for help to an extraordinary doctor―part saint, part evil-genius, a weird combination of faith healer, magician, and devil. And in so doing Jake found himself following a drastic prescription that was to draw him into a strange, compulsive relationship.
It is around the startling results of Jake Horner’s “cure” and its amazing mastermind―a doctor almost surely designed to become one of the most remarkable characters in modern fiction―that this brilliant, imaginative novel hinges. John Barth is a young writer of unusual talent whose uncanny insight into the dark mazes of the human mind has given The End of the Road a haunting and troubling reality.
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.
