On the Fever Dream Brilliance of Harry Crews

  

Harry Crews

On the Fever Dream Brilliance of Harry Crews

KEVIN WILSON CONSIDERS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SOUTHERN WRITER

Kevin Wilson
MARCH 21, 2022

I was initially drawn to Harry Crews because he had a mohawk and a tattoo of a skull, and I was twenty years old and had neither. I read Harry Crews because I wanted to figure out how, if you were a Southern writer, you didn’t simply cover the same terrain that writers like Faulkner and Welty and O’Connor and McCullers had already exhausted. I wanted to know how you leaned into what it meant to be Southern when you weren’t even sure what that meant, exactly. And I came away from Harry Crews knowing, on some level, that I wouldn’t ever write like him, could never open the wounds with the kind of ferocity that came only from knowing you’d survive it, because you’d survived much worse. And I remain a fan of Harry Crews because I still don’t know that I’ve read anyone quite like him.

Totally Booked / A Feast of Snakes

 

Totally Booked

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

[REVIEW]

Dylan Berman, Investigative & Opinion Editor
May 22, 2024

Categories: 

“A Feast of Snakes” by Harry Crews is searing, hypnotic, disgusting, brutal, visceral, hilarious, and deeply tragic. It’s a book that grabs you like a pitbull and locks its jaw. 

Harry Crews / An American Tragicomedy

 

 

Harry Crews: An American Tragicomedy

By John L. Williams.

A Preamble

Harry Crews was the last great proponent of the Southern Gothic — possessor of a blazing talent, whether displayed in a dozen fine novels, some outstanding longform journalism or an indelible memoir, A Childhood. This last has just been paid the deserved tribute of reissue as a Penguin Classic. Crews’ star, a decade after his death, is once more in the ascendant. 

Harry Crews / “My Malformed Bones”

 

Harry Crews, 1979 © Mark Morrow. Courtesy the Mark Morrow Photograph Collection, 1977–2010, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries. An exhibition of Morrow’s photographs will be on view beginning in September at the Koger Center for the Arts at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia.  

“My Malformed Bones”

Harry Crews’s counterlives

by Charlie Lee

July 2025

  

One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact particularly exceptional. This was Bacon County, Georgia, where in those days “it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife,” as he wrote in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. “It was only unusual if he hit her.” Crews and his older brother heard the shot, which blew the mantelshelf off the fireplace, from their shared bed. The shot—and the silence that followed. They fled on foot, mother and sons, down the dirt road to an uncle’s house, and the next day boarded a Greyhound bus to Jacksonville, Florida. In A Childhood, Crews recalls the details of their escape: the hurriedly packed straw suitcase, his father’s fury and frantic pleading, the sight of him frozen in the doorway under a kerosene lamp. And then, in the darkness of the road, a bizarre vision: “I began to feel myself as a slick, bloodless picture looking up from a page, dressed so that all my flaws whatsoever but particularly my malformed bones were cleverly hidden.”

Harry Crews / “A Childhood” Is One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written

Crews said that writing the book, first published in 1978, almost killed him.Photograph from the Estate of Harry Crews / Courtesy the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia

“A Childhood” Is One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written

Harry Crews’s account of hard labor and hard living in the American South, first published in 1978, animates nostalgia and then annihilates it.

By Casey Cep

28 March 2022

Two weeks after the novelist Harry Crews died, the Times appended a correction to his obituary. The original version had reported that as a child “he fell into a cauldron of scalding water used to slough the skin off slaughtered hogs.” The correction clarified that the scalding water was for sloughing off the hair.