Guided by Simone de Beauvoir’s famous essay “Must We Burn Sade” in which she highlights Sade’s ability to recognize the relationship of the erotic act to human existence, this thesis seeks to observe Sade’s influence on the work of the high-postmodernist writer, John Hawkes. Although Hawkes has largely been left out of the recent conversations regarding postmodernism, I believe that the explicit and often aberrant sexuality depicted in his work demonstrates an understanding of the potential for sexuality to communicate the socio-cultural issues important to a society and merits Hawkes’s inclusion in the postmodern canon.