DESIGNS OF TOMORROW

As a child, John Barth kept a notebook he titled “Designs of Tomorrow,” with his drawings of airplanes, ships, and cars in a style we would now call “streamline moderne.” His teen-age interest in jazz drumming and arrangement marks another stage in his exploration of the relationship between artistic form and content. Barth’s Johns Hopkins’ Master’s thesis, “The Shirt of Nessus,” exemplifies his early form-and-content formula for fiction designed to express twentieth-century experience: he employs a modernist style to relate an unconventional but realistic story. The original typescript of the thesis was stolen from the University’s library several decades ago, so this photocopy made in the 1970s by author David Morrell is the only extant hard copy.