HOW THOMAS HARRIS 'FOUND' HIS ICONIC SERIAL KILLER, HANNIBAL LECTER

Back home in the Delta, Harris would go to write in a shotgun shack in the middle of a cotton field.

FEBRUARY 10, 2026 BY BRIAN RAFTERY

On afternoon in September 1979, Linton Weeks was working at Volume One bookstore in Clarksdale, Mississippi, not far from Harris’s home-town of Rich, when a familiar-looking customer came through the door. The man wore glasses and a beard, and his head was covered in curls. It didn’t take long for Weeks to figure out his guest’s identity. For a while now, rumors had been circulating around the Delta that Tom Harris had come home.

 

Kevin Wilson: I Pretend to Have Read Books All the Time

ON THE GENIUS OF SEINFELD AND JENNIFER EGAN

KEVIN WILSON / OCTOBER 31, 2019

What time of day do you write?
I rarely write. I’m mostly inside of my head when I’m figuring out stories, so I don’t sit down and write all that much. I like keeping it inside my head, away from the page, so it can sit in my brain and get weirder as I hold onto it.

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. 

Obituaries / Harry Crews

 

Henry Craws

This article is more than 13 years old

Obituary

Harry Crews obituary

This article is more than 13 years old

American novelist whose southern gothic tales featured the requisite Bible-thumpers, snake-oil sellers and rednecks

Michael Carlson

Tue 10 Apr 2012 

The novelist Harry Crews, who has died aged 76, was part of a tradition of writers from the American south stretching back to Edgar Allan Poe and running through William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. It is sometimes described as gothic, and Crews's books featured the requisite Bible-thumpers, snake-oil sellers and seething rednecks.

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.

 

HARPER LEE. PHOTO: MICHAEL BROWN. © MICHAEL BROWN.

The Hidden Harper Lee

By Casey N. Cep

 May 15, 2019

At the end of the profile that Harper Lee wrote of Truman Capote when he published In Cold Blood, she speculated that “Kansans will spend the rest of their days at the tantalizing game of discovering Truman.” It was an odd claim; Capote loved publicity so much that even before he died, there was little left to discover about his time in Kansas, or anywhere else. Lee, by contrast, was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries: not only what she wrote, but how; not only when she stopped, but why.

T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”

T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”

By Casey N. Cep

 December 18, 2013

In 1927, Richard de la Mare had an idea for some Christmas cards. Because he was a production director at London’s Faber & Gwyer, his cards were festive poetry pamphlets that could be sent to clients and sold to customers for one shilling a piece. Because two years earlier Geoffrey Faber had lured a banker from Lloyd’s Bank to work as an editor at his publishing house, Faber & Gwyer had T. S. Eliot to contribute to the series.

Pills by Donald Ray Pollock

 

Pills

by Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock / Píldoras

   

I was hiding out in Frankie Johnson’s car, a canary yellow '69 Super Bee that could shit and get. We were on a spree, stealing anything we could get our hands on—tape players and car batteries, gasoline and beer. It was a day or two after my sixteenth birthday, and I hadn't been home in a week. And even though my old man was telling everyone around Knockemstiff that he hoped I was dead, he kept driving up and down the township roads with his head out the window looking for me like I was one of his lost coonhounds. 

Donald Ray Pollock / A Good Man Is Impossible to Find

 

A Good Man Is Impossible to Find

By Josh Ritter

• Aug. 12, 2011

From the opening sentences of Donald Ray Pollock’s violence-­soaked first novel, “The Devil All the Time,” it’s clear that blood will out. The West Virginia and southern Ohio landscapes of this book seem riven by one long, coal-smeared and hell-­harrowed gash in the earth, and the stories that vent from it file past in a crimson procession of evils so brutally creative, and so exactingly and lovingly detailed by Pollock, that over the course of the novel it becomes unclear whether they’ve been spawned for the purposes of plot or purely for atavistic pleasure.

 

Donald Ray Pollock: A Review of Knockenstiff

Posted on October 18, 2016

In my research of late into Country noir I came across the name Donald Ray Pollock. Born in 1954 and raised in Knockemstiff, Ohio, Pollock has lived his entire adult life in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he worked at the Mead Paper Mill as a laborer and truck driver until age 50, when he enrolled in the English program at Ohio State University. While there, Doubleday published his debut short story collection, Knockemstiff, and the New York Times regularly posted his election dispatches from southern Ohio throughout the 2008 campaign. The Devil All the Time, his first novel, was published in 2011. His work has appeared in various literary journals, including Epoch, Sou’wester, Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, The Journal, Boulevard, Tin House, and PEN America. His newest book, a novel called The Heavenly Table, was published by Doubleday on July 12th, 2016.1 Find him on his website: http://donaldraypollock.net/

Donald Ray Pollock / Reading Knockemstiff

 

Donald Ray Pollock

Reading Knockemstiff

Donald Ray Pollock takes Chapter 16 on a tour of the Ohio mill town where he worked for decades before turning to fiction

By Pablo Tanguay

August 19, 2011

It seemed unlikely that Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection, Knockemstiff, published in 2008, would cause much fuss in the literary world. Its eighteen stories feature a cast of characters so unseemly and depraved, so lacking in common sense or decency, that the book was sure to sell a few copies to a few weirdoes and be forgotten. But Pollock’s voice is so assured and his vision so precise (and his humor so black) that critics couldn’t help but praise the book as a minor masterpiece.

Donald Ray Pollock / On Finding Fiction Late In Life

 

Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock 

On Finding Fiction Late In Life

JULY 26, 201111:01 AM ET

Knockemstiff, Ohio, is a tiny hamlet in southern Ohio. In the 1950s, Knockemstiff had three stores, a bar and a population of about 450 people. Most of those people, says fiction writer Donald Ray Pollock, were "connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another."

Demian Naón interviews writer Donald Ray Pollock

 

Demian Naón interviews writer Donald Ray Pollock 

 

What was your childhood like in relation to writing? 

 

Of course, as most people know by now, I grew up in a very small community in southern Ohio called Knockemstiff.  Most of the people who lived there were poor, and my family was related to many of them.  However, my father, who had only an eighth grade education, was lucky enough to have a union job in a paper mill in nearby Chillicothe, and I suppose we were what would now be called lower middle-class.  There were no books in our house, but there were magazines, trashy stuff mostly dealing with crime and romance, and so that’s what I started out reading.   Many of the characters in my work feel stuck in the place they were born in, and want to escape to somewhere else, which was also one of my dominant desires when I was a kid.  But like them, I never did.

Sincerity, rawness, Ohio / Conversation with Donald Ray Pollock

 

Donald Ray Pollock

Sincerity, rawness,Ohio

Conversation with Donald Ray Pollock

28 NOVember 2012

Question: Knockemstiff was a lacerating piece of writing, harsh and gritty, sometimes even nasty and cruel. Its sudden appearance on the literary scene was like a punch in the face that knocked quite a few readers out. The stories leave us with a feeling of emptiness which grows and grows as we keep on reading, partly because we are aware that they are based on real events and real people. Was Knockemstiff an introspective effort to release yourself from the drowsy grip of the city itself, of your hometown?