John Hawkes

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 by John Hawkes

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(1925-1998)

1949	The 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."
1951	The 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."
1954	The 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.
1961	The 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.
1964	Second 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.
1969	Lunar Landscapes. This collection includes short stories, the novella Charivari, and two short novels, The Goose on the Grave and The Owl.
1971	The 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.
1974	Death, 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."
1976	Travesty. 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.
1979	The 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.
1982	Virginie: 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.
1985	Adventures 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.
1988	Whistlejacket. 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."
1993	Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse. Hawkes continues his equine theme begun in Whistlejacket (1988) with this autobiography of a racehorse.
1996	The 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.

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John Hawkes (novelist)

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For the actor, see John Hawkes (actor). For the tennis player, see John Hawkes (tennis).

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (March 2010)

John Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr. (August 17, 1925 – May 15, 1998), was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.

Contents

1 Biography
2 Quotations
3 Works
4 Awards and Award Nominations
5 Bibliography
6 External links
7 Notes

Biography

Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Thomas Pynchon is said to have admired the novel and thought Hawkes an unmatched stylist. His second novel, The Beetle Leg (1951), an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th century American literature.
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."^[1]
"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."
"The writer should always serve as his own angleworm —and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better."

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 (plays) (1966)
Lunar Landscapes (short stories) (1969)
The Blood Oranges (1970)
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 (1984)
Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985)
Innocence in extremis (1985)
Whistlejacket (1988)
Sweet William (1993)
The Frog (1996)
An Irish Eye (1997)

Awards and Award Nominations

1962 - American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award.
1965 - National Book Award nomination for Second Skin
1973 - Prix du Meilleur livre étranger for The Blood Oranges
1986 - Prix Médicis étranger for Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade
1990 - Lannan Literary Award.

Bibliography

Ferrari, Rita. Innocence, Power, and the Novels of John Hawkes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Hryciw-Wing, Carol A. John Hawkes : a research guide. New York : Garland Pub., 1986
Hryciw-Wing, Carol A. John Hawkes : an annotated bibliography /with four introductions by John Hawkes. Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1977

External links

Notes

^ Bradbury, Malcolm. The novel today: contemporary writers on modern fiction. Manchester University Press, 1977, p. 7.

Persondata
Name	Hawkes, John
Alternative names	Hawkes, John Clendennin Talbot Burne, Jr. (birth name)
Short description	Novelist, educator
Date of birth	August 17, 1925
Place of birth	Stamford, Connecticut, United States
Date of death	May 15, 1998
Place of death	Providence, Rhode Island, United States

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