In 1935, after living briefly in New York City, Hawkes and his mother joined his father, an adventurer and businessman, in Juneau, Alaska, where they spent five years. They moved back to New York in 1940. In 1943, when Hawkes entered Harvard University, he began writing poetry, producing the privately printed
Fiasco Hall (1943). After a disappointing semester he left Harvard to serve as an American Field Service ambulance driver in Italy and Germany in 1944-1945 (toward the end of World War II), an experience that often shaped the war-torn European settings of his fiction. Following his return to Harvard in 1945, he began writing fiction, met Sophie Goode Tazewell, and followed her to Fort Peck, Montana, where they married on 5 September 1947. During this time he began his first work of short fiction, "Charivari," which gained him admission to Albert J. Guerard's creative writing class at Harvard. Under Guerard's mentorship and with his wife's support, Hawkes began his formal writing career.
Guerard introduced Hawkes to James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions, who developed a longstanding relationship with the writer and published his first ten books.
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