John Barth: Final Fridays

Rings from a tongue. .

The Accidental Mentor

1 Leslie Fiedler and American Culture, ed. Kellman & Malin (U. Delaware Press, 2003).

2 True at the time: Fiedler died in Buffalo, NY, on January 29, 2003.

3 Cited earlier in this volume, in “The State of the Art,” and happily still an overstatement. See my essay “Inconclusion: The Novel in the Next Century,” in Further Fridays.

4 Subtitled Class Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

“As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy”

1 First published in Review of Contemporary Fiction , Fall 2004.

The Last Introduction

1 As of 10/04/88, when this introduction was first delivered. Two more volumes were to come: the novel Closing Time in 1994 and the memoir Now and Then in 1998.

The Judge’s Jokes

1 First published in The American Scholar 76:2, Spring 2007.

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Not really ‘final’ after all: In 2011 we were delighted to receive a just-published copy of Updike’s essay-collection called Higher Gossip —not least of its pleasures the sprightly cover photo of the author by Irving Penn.