John Hawkes was born in Stamford, Connecticut on 17 August 1925. He married Sophie Goode Tazewell in 1947, and they have four children. Hawkes took his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1949. He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and CCNY, and he is currently professor of English at Brown University. Although his fiction is perhaps too esoteric to generate best-seller sales, Hawkes has earned wide-ranging critical applause including the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and fellowships from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and from the Rockefeller, Ford, and Guggenheim Foundations.
Hawkes's fiction rejects the conventions of the traditional novel which developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with such staples as round characters, realistic settings, logical plots, and recognizable themes. The discoveries of Freud and Einstein, the fury of world war, the general breakdown of civil order--in short, the chaos of the twentieth century--deny the notion of orderly processes and social reconciliation which the conventional novel illustrates.
