Exhibits: The Sheridan Libraries and Museums
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  • Lost & Found in the Funhouse: The John Barth Collection
    • INTRODUCTION
    • CREATION
    • PUBLICATION
    • CIRCULATION
    • FOR WHOM IS THE FUNHOUSE FUN?
    • EXHIBITION CREDITS
    • BEGINNINGS
    • DESIGNS OF TOMORROW
    • EARLY INFLUENCES
    • 1960s READING LIST
    • CONSTRUCTING A FUNHOUSE
    • THE EASTERN SHORE
    • FAN LETTERS

THE EASTERN SHORE

 
"Rivals" and "Showboat," from Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater, with Barth's notes
Manuscript of "Literature, History, Fiction, Truth, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs," with lecture slides and envelope
Table of contents, Tales of the Chesapeake, with Barth's notes
Cover of North Dorchester Heritage Festival
Aerial view of Cambridge
"Novelist John Barth: Maryland as Metaphor"
Cover of The Floating Opera
Cover of Le Courtier en Tabac
Cover of Sabbatical: A Romance
Cover of The Tidewater Tales
Cover of The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Cover of Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera

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.”

← CONSTRUCTING A FUNHOUSE
FAN LETTERS →
CREATION
THE EASTERN SHORE

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