Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Thomas Pynchon is said to have admired the novel and thought Hawkes an unmatched stylist. His second novel, The Beetle Leg (1951), an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th century American literature.Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.