Bibliography
See studies by P. O'Donnell (1982) and D. J. Greiner (1985).
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Columbia Encyclopedia:
John Hawkes |
Bibliography
See studies by P. O'Donnell (1982) and D. J. Greiner (1985).
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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
Works by John Hawkes |
| 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. |
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
John Hawkes (novelist) |
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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.
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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.
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![]() | Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
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![]() | Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature. 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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