Hawes is former staff member at
The New Yorker, and has contributed "Talk of the Town" and "Reporter" pieces to that magazine, as well as essays and reviews to
The New York Times Magazine and
Book Review,
The Nation and numerous other publications. She was also the
ghostwriter for
Martha Stewart’s best-selling books
Entertaining and
Weddings. Hawes is the author of
New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, 1869-1930 (Knopf, 1992), a narrative account of the golden age of the New York luxury
apartment house that tells how New York was transformed architecturally, socially, and psychologically from a provincial city into a great metropolis. Her most recent book,
Camus: A Romance, (Grove Press, 2009) is a biography-memoir of the Nobel Prize–winning French-Algerian writer
Albert Camus, in which she chronicles his life along with her own experience trying to follow in his footsteps. ==Personal life==