Born in Cambridge, Maryland, Barth has often explored the waterways, characters, and traditions of the Eastern Shore as sources for fiction. An Aubrey Bodine photograph of the original Floating Opera, the James Adams showboat, inspired his first novel. Maryland history enters into The Sot-Weed Factor and LETTERS. George Townsend’s 1880 Tales of the Chesapeake helped Barth devise and is also briefly mentioned in both Sabbatical and The Tidewater Tales. For Barth, who is an accomplished sailor, the region even helps him describe his own craft: “storytellers and Chesapeake Bay blue crabs have something in common,” he wrote in “Literature, History, Fiction, Truth, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs”; “they usually approach what they're after sideways.”