The End of the Road 穷途末路 by John Barth.docVIP

? ? Back Cover: ? 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 ofThe End of the Road ,The Sot-Weed Factor , andGiles Goat-Boy has more than justified this promise. ???????????InThe 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 Roadhas 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. --Harpers ? 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 2 The Wicomico State Teachers College Sits in a Great Flat Open Field ? ???????????The Wicomico State Teachers College sits in a great flat open fieldringed with loblolly pine trees, at the southeastern edge of the town of Wicomico, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Its physical plant consists of a single graceless brick building with two ells, a building too large for the pseudo-Georgian style in which it is constructed. A deep semicircular drive runs in from College Avenue to the main entrance. ???????????In July, when the day of my interview approached, I loaded my belongings into my Chevrolet and relinquished the key to my room on East Chase Street, in Baltimore, for I meant to take lodgings in Wicomico at once, whether I were hired or not. This was on a Sunday. The date of the interview had originally been set for Tuesday in the letter I received in answer to my application, but on the Saturday afternoon before I left Baltimore the president of the college had te