He took few literature courses but read voraciously during his leisure time and while working in the university's Classics Library. His job, filing books in the Oriental Seminary collection, exposed him to the vast scale and intricate construction of such frame narratives as
The Ocean of Story,
The Panchatantra, and
The Thousand and One Nights' Entertainments, stimulating a lifelong critical and artistic interest in the possibilities of narrative framing and embedding.
On 11 January 1950 Barth married Harriette Anne Strickland. That year he published two short stories in the university's student literary magazine and one in The Hopkins Review. He received his B.A. in the spring of 1951. That summer he and his wife had a daughter, Christine Anne. Needing to provide for his family but lacking interest in finding a "real" job, he compromised by taking an assistantship in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins in the fall. His 1952 M.A. thesis was "Shirt of Nessus," a realistic novel set in Maryland. His first agent, Lurton Blassingame, was unable to find a publisher for the work, which Barth later characterized as "a neo-primitive miscarriage, justifiably unpublished." In 1952 the Barths had a son, John Strickland.
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