[5][6][7][8] Aside from studying under and befriending John Barth, Martone also developed a close relationship with the writer Thomas Pynchon while the two lived together in Brooklyn.

[9] It was later on, while teaching at Syracuse in the early 1990s, that Martone befriended a young David Foster Wallace and introduced to him a number of influential works, most notably Lewis Hyde's The Gift.

"[12] The permeable boundary between fact and fiction is reflected in books like his 2001 The Blue Guide to Indiana which, as a disclaimer on the cover makes clear, "is in no way affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with the series of travel books titled Blue Guide," and "in no way factually depicts or accurately represents the State of Indiana.

"[13] The disclaimer, Martone explains, was included after he received a cease and desist letter from the publisher of "the real Blue Guide.

"[14] This letter in turn inspired the opening chapter of Martone's 2015 anthology, Winesburg, Indiana, written in the form of a cease and desist letter from the fictional town of Winesburg—created by the novelist Sherwood Anderson—which claims proprietary rights to “the distribution of Sadness, Fear, Longing, and Confusion itself.

We extensively market Grief.“[15] Martone further obscured the line between fact and fiction in his 2020 book, The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, which was called "an ingenious reimagining of the real-life inventor of skywriting" by the New York Times.

[16] Martone has devoted much of his career to disrupting and defamiliarizing the taken-as-given notions of order, ownership, and identity in his field, and has been described as literature's "most notorious mutineer.

"[17] In 1988 his membership to the American Academy of Poets was briefly revoked after he published two books, one listed as "prose" and one as "poetry" which were—aside from the line-breaks in one—completely identical to one another.