Hawkes Home Page May 18, 1998 John Hawkes , Experimental Novelist, Is Dead at 72 By ERIC PACE ohn Hawkes , a veteran and highly praised author of avant-garde and experimental fiction, died Friday at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. He was 72 and lived in Providence. The cause was a stroke that Hawkes had during heart bypass surgery on Monday at the hospital, said his son Jack. Hawkes was called a figure "in a post-modern pantheon of experimental novelists who include John Barth, William Gass and William Gaddis" by Mel Gussow in The New York Times in 1996. Applause for Hawkes ' fiction also came from fellow writers and scholars. Gaddis once said Hawkes ' "sentences are themselves 'events."' Novelist Edmund White said Hawkes "must be ranked as America's greatest living visionary." And Robert Kelly, a short-story writer teaching at Bard College, wrote that Hawkes had "outrageous lyric power." In an interview quoted in the journal Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature in 1965, Hawkes said: "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 fiction or structure was really all that remained. And structure verbal and psychological coherence is still my largest concern as a writer." His first novel, "The Cannibal" (New Directions), came out in 1949. His prominence in contemporary letters was enlarged by three novels published in the 1970s, "The Blood Oranges" (1971, Viking Penguin), "Death, Sleep and the Traveler" (1974, New Directions) and "Travesty" (1976, New Directions). | |
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