The End of the Road

Exciting, important, a great American novel John Barth emerged as one of the most exciting and promising novelists of his generation with the publication of his first novel, The Floating Opera. The subsequent appearance of The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor, and Giles Goat-Boy has more than justified this promise. In The End of the Road, Barth tells an intensely perceptive, funny, and savagely realistic tale, with a principal character, Jake Horner, who has been described as "one of the most fantastically dreadful" to appear in a long time. "The End of the Road has more freshness, more wit and invention, and more intellectual life of its own than most recent American fiction. It is a horrifying book too, and neither the vocabulary nor the situations will recommend themselves to the squeamish." -Harper's "A brilliant novel of marital infidelity on a college campus by the best writer we have at the present, and one of the best we have ever had." - New York Times