The Modern Novel

Biography

John Hawkes was born in 1925 in Stamford, Connecticut. His early life was spent in New England and New York but the family did spend five years in Juneau, Alaska. He went to Harvard but dropped out to become an ambulance driver in Italy and Germany but returned to Harvard after the War. After graduating from Harvard, where he had started writing, he worked at the university press. He taught for a while at Harvard before taking up a teaching post at Brown University where he worked till he retired in 1988. He published a succession of novels, short stories and plays, distinguished by their experimental nature. His philosophy was summed up in the following – 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. He died in 1998.

Other links

John Hawkes
John Hawkes
John Hawkes
An Appreciation of John Hawkes
All That Remains: On the Fiction of John Hawkes
Interview