Upon receiving his B.A. degree, he remained at Harvard to work at the University press (1949-1955) and later to teach in the English department (1955-1967). Since 1967 Hawkes has been a professor of English at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Hawkes's literary career began in 1949 with the commercial publication of the novella Charivari. Remaining a relatively obscure writer until the 1960s, he began to receive recognition after the publication of The Lime Twig (1961) and Second Skin (1964). At this turning point in his career he accepted a grant from the Ford Foundation for work in the theatre. Just as his fiction rejects the limitations of the traditional novel, so do his plays disturb the audience's expectations of a night at the theatre. An experimental playwright, Hawkes approaches the theatre with the innovative concern and cold detachment necessary to disrupt conventional expectations for a dramatic rendering of reality. Instead, he creates fictional worlds where the absurd happens and where everyone's deepest nightmares thrive. Thus he shares the same dramatic interests as many experimental playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s--such as Beckett, Ionesco, Albee, and Pinter.
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