university professor, also set The End of the Road on a university campus. ReceptionGiles Goat-Boy was on The New York Times bestseller list in 1966 for 12 weeks, but was coldly received in England. The novel was initially reviewed enthusiastically, and "inspired critical awe and cultish popular devotion." However, by 1984, Robert Alter referred to the book as "reced[ing] into the detritus of failed experiments in American fiction", calling it "little more than an inflated translation game ... so brittle a cleverness that it constantly reveals the tediousness of the novel's informing conception." While it enjoyed a cult status in the 1960s, the novel has since become one of Barth's least-read works. John Gardner called the book a morally "empty but well-made husk." Gore Vidal called it "a very bad prose-work", dismissing it as one of a number of overly academic "teachers' novel[s]." In a 1967 article, science fiction author Judith Merril praised the novel for its sophistication in handling sexual material. Giles Goat-Boy is considered by many to be Barth's best work. Barth's own statements on the primacy of aesthetics in his writing have tended to obscure the book's otherwise obvious politics, particularly the 1960s Cold War allegory. Robert Scholes was among the early critics who dismissed the elaborate allegory as irrelevant, and critics since then have emphasized the role of the hero and the quest in the book's construction. In the 1980s, Barth revisited his 1960s works and came to acknowledge their historical context, including a new preface to the 1987 edition of Giles Goat-Boy. Legacy In 1967, after the success of Giles Goat-Boy, Barth was able to release a revised one-volume edition of his first two novels (The Floating Opera and The End of the Road) that restore the books' original, darker endings. Barth has come to see Giles Goat-Boy as "the first American postmodernist novel," an assertion picked up by many of his critics and biographers, but not universally accepted. The novel was the central exhibit of Robert Scholes' The Fabulators (1967), a study of a tendency in contemporary writers to eschew realism in fiction. See also 1966 in literature American literature References Works cited Further reading Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. (First published in 1949.) James L. McDonald, "Barth's Syllabus: The Frame of Giles Goat-Boy. Critique 13.3 (1972): 5–10. Peter Mercer, The Rhetoric of "Giles Goat-Boy" Novel: