The Shirt of Nessus
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The Shirt of Nessus (1952) is the masters thesis of noted American postmodern novelist John Barth. Written for the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University, which Barth himself later ran, The Shirt of Nessus is not a dissertation, but rather a short novel or novella. It can be considered the first full-length fictional work of Barth's, and it also is likely to remain the most elusive. Barth, not unlike a fair number of other authors, has revealed himself to be embarrassed by his early non-published work; in this case, most anything before The Floating Opera. The Shirt of Nessus is briefly referenced in both of Barth's non-fiction collections, The Friday Book and Further Fridays, but little is known of its actual content. The only known copies not held by the author were kept in the Johns Hopkins school library and the Writing Seminars Department thesis copies - however, recent inquiries by devoted Barth fans have shown that the copy held by the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins disappeared in the mid-1960's, while the other seemed to mysteriously "walk out" of the school's special collections division of the library. It is the opinion of some notable JHU faculty members who occasionally talk to Barth that he may have even been the mastermind behind these disappearances himself. While that remains speculation, when the special collections division notified Barth in 2002 (when the volume was first found to be missing), Barth responded that he "was not altogether unhappy the library no longer had a copy".
It is also the title of a 1956 non-fiction book dealing with anti-nazi groups in Germany during World War II.