Quantum dilaton gravity in the light-cone gauge

Recently, models of two-dimensional dilaton gravity have been shown to admit classical black-hole solutions that exhibit Hawking radiation at the semi-classical level. These classical and semi-classical analyses have been performed in conformal gauge. We show in this paper that a similar analysis in the light--cone gauge leads to the same results. Moreover, quantization of matter fields in light--cone gauge can be naturally extended to include quantizing the metric field {\it \`a la} KPZ. We argue that this may provide a new framework to address many issues associated to black-hole physics.