Harry Crews was born June 7, 1935, during the Great Depression to two poor tenant farmers in Bacon County, Georgia.
His father died while he was still a baby, and his mother soon
remarried to his father's brother. Crews was unaware that this man was
not his biological father until years later.
As a child, he suffered two near-death experiences. When he was just five he contracted polio,
causing his legs to fold up into the back of his thighs. He was
originally told by doctors that he would not be able to walk again.
After about a year of being immobile, except crawling with his hands,
his legs straightened again and he was able to walk. Soon after this
experience, he then fell into a vat of nearly boiling water, which was
being used for soaking dead hogs before they were further prepared. His
head did not go under the water, which saved his life, according to
doctors. He suffered extreme burns on most of the rest of his body. He
once again was unable to leave the bed when he was healing. Crews wrote
in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place: "Nearly everybody I
knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear
half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence
staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying
scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks."[1]
These experiences later influenced the freakish characters he wrote
about, although he did not like to use the term "freak" to describe
them.
While Crews was still a child, his mother left his stepfather, and he and his brother went with her to live in the Springfield section of Jacksonville, Florida. Crews finished high school there as a below average student. After graduation, he joined the Marines during the Korean War. After his service, he attended the University of Florida on the G.I. Bill. Here, Crews became a student of Andrew Nelson Lytle, who had also taught Flannery O'Connor, and James Dickey. Crews and Lytle kept in contact for years afterwards, and Lytle provided criticism of Crews's early work.
After an unplanned pregnancy, Crews married Sally Ellis, who gave
birth to his first son, Patrick Scott. Sally soon wanted a divorce due
to his infidelity and obsessiveness with writing. "I was obsessed to the
point of desperation with becoming a writer," he wrote, "and, further, I
lived with the conviction that I had gotten a late start toward that
difficult goal…Consequently, perhaps I was impatient, irritable, and
inattentive toward Sally as a young woman and mother."[2] However, he soon convinced Sally to remarry, and they had a second son, Byron Jason.
Crews graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in
English, and eventually received a graduate degree of education. Crews
then began teaching English, which he continued to do for the rest of
his career, along with his career as a writer. In 1963, he had his first
story published: "The Unattached Smile". In 1964, he published another
short story, "A Long Wail".
In 1964 his first son, Patrick, drowned in a neighbor's pool. Crews tried to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but this proved ineffectual. After the death of his son, Crews continued writing his first novel, The Gospel Singer, which appeared in 1968. Just after this publication, another came for his second novel, Naked in Garden Hills.
Both were well received by critics at the time. In 1972, Sally asked
for a second and final divorce. Crews did not marry again. His sole
surviving son, Byron Jason Crews, is personal representative and acting
executor of the Harry Crews Literary Estate.[3
Writing career and style
After Crews's first two novels, he wrote prolifically, including novels, screenplays and essays, for journals including Esquire and Playboy.
He often set precise due times to finish whatever he was working on,
and so had quick turnaround between writings. Once he published The Gospel Singer, he began to write eight novels, publishing one almost every year. Much of Crews's work is now out of print.
His works were known to feature "freaks", and "outcasts", usually from rural areas. In Car, a man consumes an entire car by slowly eating piece by piece. In The Knockout Artist, a poor, Georgia-born boxer with a glass jaw knocks himself out at parties for money. A Feast of Snakes, one of his best known, and most provocative novels, was banned for a time in South Africa.
Crews felt strongly that authors should write about experiences
that they have actually had. In his personal life, he often moved from
obsession to obsession, and became knowledgeable on many subjects. Crews
and Sally learned karate together, which then influenced Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit. In addition, The Hawk is Dying
features an amateur hawk trainer who deals with condescension from
college professors, and features a son-figure who drowns. Crews himself
had a fascination with hawks for a period of time, and even trapped and
trained them so they would sit on his arm. Body is a story about a competitive female body builder, her trainer, and her lower-class family from Waycross, Georgia. Crews himself trained his girlfriend, Maggie Powell, who would become a Southeast bodybuilding champion.
During his time writing for Esquire, he wrote a column called "Grits"[4] for fourteen months in the 1970s that covered such topics as cockfighting and dog fighting.[5]
Filled with rough experiences he had outside of urban life, "grits"
became a term he used to describe the tough southern characters featured
in his writing.
Crews continued writing and publishing his entire life. As his reputation grew, he became a favorite of Madonna, Sean Penn, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore. Madonna and Penn discussed making film adaptations of his novels, but these never came to fruition. Crews's final novel, An American Family,
featured a blurb on the cover from Moore, saying, "God bless Harry
Crews, America's best writer. He’ll break your heart but he'll always
bring you love."
The University of Georgia
acquired Crews's papers in August 2006. The archive includes
manuscripts and typescripts of his fiction, correspondence, and notes
made by Crews while on assignment.[6]
Crews died on March 28, 2012, from complications of neuropathy.[7] His sole surviving son, Byron J. Crews, is professor emeritus of English and Dramatic Writing at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.[3]
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