The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

by Mark McGurl

Exemplary in this regard was John Hawkes, a wildly experimental writer who taught at Brown University for many years. His student Rick Moody summarizes his notoriously amorous approach to teaching thusly: “He wanted us to believe in literature. He felt he had done his job if we could explain why The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was a masterpiece, from the standpoint of language and construction. Hawkes played favorites, which was bad; and he loved women a lot more than men, which was bad too; and he allowed us to drink wine in class, which in my case was an incredibly bad idea, since I was developing a drinking problem. All these things were inadvisable, but what was not was the idea of emotional commitment to the process, a strong relationship between student and professor.”