John Hawkes (novelist)

For the actor, see John Hawkes

John Hawkes (born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., 17 August 1925 &bdash; 15 May, 1998). Born in Stamford, Connecticut he was an avant garde American novelist and a post-modernist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.

Educated at Harvard, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Though he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim.

Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.

Quotations

"For me, everything depends on language."

"I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."

"Like the poem, the experimental fiction is an exclamation of psychic materials which come to the writer all readily distorted, prefigured in that inner schism between the rational and the absurd."

"Everything I have written comes out of nightmare, out of the nightmare of war, I think."

Works

• Charivari (1949)
• The Cannibal (1949)
• The Beetle Leg (1951)
• The Goose on the Grave (1954)
• The Owl (1954)
• The Lime Twig (1961)
• Second Skin (1964)
• The Innocent Party (1966) - plays
• Lunar Landscapes (1969) - short stories
• The Blood Oranges (1971)
• Death, Sleep, and the Traveler (1974)
• Travesty (1976)
• The Passion Artist (1979)
• Virginie Her Two Lives (1982)
• Humors of blood & skin: A John Hawkes reader
• Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985)
• Whistlejacket (1988)
• Sweet William (1993)
• The Frog (1996)
• An Irish Eye (1997)