French literary theorist and cultural critic. Born in the French town of Cherbourg, Barthes grew up in Normandy and later Paris. Despite showing great promise as a student of French literature and the classics, he suffered from ill health that hampered his education and made him something of an outsider in academia. His best-known essay, The Death of the Author (1968), draws upon the intellectual currents of his day-existentialism, Marxism, semiology, and structuralism, for example-to assert that literary texts exist outside authorial intention or control; thus readers, not writers, create meaning. Barthes's fiercely anti-bourgeois views on modern society and literature-developed in essay collections such as Mythologies (1957) and S/Z (1970)-were controversial when first published, but his methods have greatly informed those employed by contemporary cultural critics. See also egs.edu/library/roland-barthes/biography.