FAN LETTERS

The short fiction experimentalist Donald Barthelme, the Midwestern philosopher and writer William Gass, the irreverent war journalist Norman Mailer—these are just a few of the literary peers with whom Barth has engaged in robust correspondences. Barth’s letters to these men trace an enduring camaraderie. All of them were engaged in a similar struggle to invent new literary methods and write books that would thunder across the American postmodern scene.