John Hawkes

John Hawkes (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).

Hawkes, John [Clendennin Burne, Jr.] (1925–), Connecticut‐born novelist, a graduate of Harvard, has taught English at Brown University (1958– ). His fiction includes The Cannibal (1949), two related stories presenting almost surrealistically the horrors of devastation in postwar Germany; The Beetle Leg (1951), a novel about a construction worker buried alive during the building of a dam and the psychological effect of his death upon friends and co‐workers; The Goose on the Grave (1954) and The Owl (1954), two short novels set in Italy; The Lime Twig (1961), about the psychopathic effects on a man of life during and after the London blitz; Second Skin (1964), about an aging former navy officer who sheds his old life of violence, horror, and sadness to live a new one that is joyous and sensuous; The Blood Oranges (1971), about a contemptible American couple in Greece who destroy a friendly visiting couple; Death, Sleep and the Traveler (1974), a man's phantasmagoric view of events that involve himself, his wife, and his friend who is her lover; Travesty (1976), a Frenchman's monologue that serves as a suicide note while he prepares to kill his daughter, a friend, and himself; The Passion Artist (1979), presenting a middle‐aged widower's fantastic encounters in a European city; Virginie (1982), about a girl who has experienced two previous lives in France, both marked by bizarre sexual experiences; Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985), a tale of a boy encountering hunting and sex in an excursion to Alaska, of which Innocence in Extremis (1985), a segment less than 100 pages long, was separately issued; and Whistlejacket (1988), about a gifted photographer fascinated by a major subject, a great show horse. The Innocent Party (1966) collects four short plays, and Lunar Landscapes (1969) collects stories and novellas. The plots of Hawkes's fiction are often oblique, set in a nightmare or a dream kind of world, told in an intricate, highly personal style that frequently verges on the abstract, and marked by a macabre humor.