John Hawkes papers (Ms. 85.18)

Biographical note

John Hawkes was the author of 16 novels, including The Cannibal, The Lime Twig, The Blood Oranges, and Travesty and Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. An important figure in the post-war generation of American writers that includes John Barth, William Gaddis, and William Gass, he once claimed that he wrote fiction "on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme". He was one of the first writers in America to champion an iconoclastic "postmodern" or "metafictive" spirit in fiction, a spirit which insisted on formal experimentation, savage comedy and total imaginative freedom. Edmund White called him "America's greatest visionary".

Jack Hawkes was born in Stamford, Connecticut on August 17, 1925. In his own words, he was "an only child and an asthmatic". He went to Harvard in 1943 and a year later left for Europe to serve as an American Field Service ambulance driver in Italy and Germany. After the war he returned to Harvard and taught English there from 1955 to 1958. He then moved to Brown University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988.

In 1947, Hawkes married Sophie Tazewell, with whom he had three sons and one daughter. Hawkes died in Providence, RI on the 15th of May, 1998.

Biography from John Hawkes' obituary in The Independent, written by Patrick McGrath. The obituary was printed on Wednesday, 3 June 1998.