The Dead Father is a post-modernist novel by author Donald Barthelme published in 1975 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The book relates the journey of a vaguely defined entity that symbolizes fatherhood, hauled by a small group of people as the plot unravels through narratives, anecdotes, dialogues, reflexions and allegories presented to the reader through the tools and constructions of postmodern literature, in which the author excelled as a short story writer.

Chapter 17 includes an adapted version of a previously published short story, "A Manual for Sons", that is much in the style and character of the novel.

The "Dead Father" is being hauled with a cable by some of his children, across lands and under all weather conditions, towards a goal of an emancipatory nature but that is left mysterious throughout most of the story, to be revealed, at the end of the novel, to be his burial spot.

They thus strike deeply the reader whose own understanding is left to resonate with that angle that their own mood or personal history is more fit to catch.

Another, parallel concept is the awe and respect that the Dead Father exercises on his children at the same time as his pathetic surrender to their demands of dispossessing him and the distaste he evokes in them.