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John Hawkes

 
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: John Hawkes
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Hawkes, John (John Clendennin Burne Hawkes, Jr.), 1925-98, American writer, b. Stamford, Conn., grad. Harvard, 1949. He taught English at Brown Univ. after 1958. Hawkes is considered one of the most original American writers of the 20th cent. His highly experimental works-complex, ambiguous, and grimly humorous-blend everyday reality with menacing hallucinations. His works include the novels The Lime Twig (1951), Second Skin (1964), Blood Oranges (1971), Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985), and An Irish Eye (1997) as well as The Goose on the Grave (1954), a collection of short fiction.

Bibliography

See studies by P. O'Donnell (1982) and D. J. Greiner (1985).

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Works: Works by John Hawkes
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(1925-1998)

1949The Cannibal. Hawkes's first novel is a nightmarish vision of occupied Germany as a plot is hatched to assassinate the lone American overseer. Hawkes said, "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme." In this, his first fictional experiment, he replaces what he abandoned with "totality of vision" and "structure--verbal and psychological coherence."
1951The Beetle Leg. Hawkes's intensely surrealistic second novel concerns a construction worker buried alive during the building of an irrigation dam in the West. According to the reviewer of the Saturday Review, "The avant garde has now taken over the western story and I'm afraid it will never be quite the same again."
1954The Goose and the Grave and The Owl. Called by one reviewer "perhaps the only militant surrealist writer in America," Hawkes publishes two short novels, both set in a dream version of Italy.
1961The Lime Twig. Most critics consider this the first novel of Hawkes's major phase and one of the novels, along with Barth's Sot-Weed Factor, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Pynchon's V., that helped expand the possibilities of American fiction and usher in literary postmodernism. Set in wartime and postwar Britain, it concerns an attempt to steal a famous racehorse and run it under a false name. Flannery O'Connor writes, You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can't.
1964Second Skin. Regarded by many as Hawkes's masterpiece, the novel chronicles the rebirth and regeneration from violence and despair of a middle-aged former naval officer, Papa Cue Ball.
1969Lunar Landscapes. This collection includes short stories, the novella Charivari, and two short novels, The Goose on the Grave and The Owl.
1971The Blood Oranges. Hawkes's novel about the breaking down of sexual conventions concerns two American couples on a Greek island who swap partners. It is the first in a series of novels employing an unreliable narrator.
1974Death, Sleep, and the Traveler. The narrator describes his relationship with his wife and her lover in a novel that reviewer Calvin Benedict asserts is "likely to endure as a small classic."
1976Travesty. The novel takes the form of a monologue by a French poet who explains why he intends to crash his car, killing himself, his daughter, and her friend. It is the final installment of a series of three novels, begun with The Blood Oranges and continued with Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, which uses unreliable narrators reflecting on the connection between love and the imagination.
1979The Passion Artist. Having admitted to being "tired of being called America's best unknown writer," Hawkes makes a bid for a wider readership by reducing his customary demands on his readers. The story concerns protagonist Konrad Vost's relationships with various women.
1982Virginie: Her Two Lives. Hawkes employs his first female narrator, recording her existence in 1740 and 1945 in a parody of the pornographic novel. The book makes fun of the various erotic fantasies men have constructed.
1985Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. Hawkes echoes Jack London in this novel narrated by the proprietor of an Alaskan brothel who is haunted by the adventures and mysterious death of her father. A section of the novel, Innocent in Extremis, is published separately.
1988Whistlejacket. Hawkes's novel alternates between scenes from the life of nineteenth-century artist George Stubbs and the modern Van Fleet family, owners of Stubbs's portrait of the title figure. Patrick McGrath calls it an "interesting and tantalizing book" that is "quite strong enough to maintain John Hawkes's position as the most consistently interesting writer, in terms of formal inventiveness, intelligence, and the sheer grace of the prose, at work in the United States today."
1993Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse. Hawkes continues his equine theme begun in Whistlejacket (1988) with this autobiography of a racehorse.
1996The Frog. Hawkes's Kafkaesque novel depicts a French boy with a frog living in his stomach. It would be followed by his last fiction, An Irish Eye (1996), a monologue by a female foundling who falls in love with a World War I veteran.

Wikipedia: John Hawkes
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Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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