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Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews
“Brilliantly renders the life of the late writer Harry Crews . . . It captures the wild spirit of an unflinching American writer.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) In 2010, Ted Geltner drove to Gainesville, Florida, to pay a visit to Harry Crews and ask the legendary author if he would be willing to be the subject of a literary biography. His health rapidly deteriorating, Crews told Geltner he was on board and would even sit for interviews and tell his stories one last time. “Ask me anything you want, bud,” Crews said. “But you’d better do it quick.” The result is Blood, Bone, and Marrow, the first full-length biography of one of the most unlikely figures in twentieth-century American literature, a writer who emerged from a dirt-poor South Georgia tenant farm and went on to create a singularly unique voice of fiction. With books such as Scar Lover, Body, and Naked in Garden Hills, Crews opened a new window into southern life, focusing his lens on the poor and disenfranchised, the people who skinned the hogs and tended the fields, the “grits,” as Crews affectionately called his characters and himself. He lived by a code of his own design, flouting authority and baring his soul, and the stories of his whiskey-and-blood-soaked lifestyle created a myth to match any of his fictional creations. His outlaw life, his distinctive voice and the context in which he lived combine to form the elements of a singularly compelling narrative about an underappreciated literary treasure. “Harry Crews led a big, strange, sad and somehow very American life. It is well told here.”—The New York Times
453 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 15, 2016
42 people are currently reading
654 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
March 3, 2023
When I finished this book I was glad to be done with Harry Crews. I read The Gospel Singer, A Feast of Snakes and Harry’s memoir A Childhood, and loved all three. But the more I read about Harry himself, the more I disliked him and I knew I would have paid good money to never be within half a mile of him. It made me wonder if I generally liked the people I read biographies of so I checked the last ten and the results were
LIKED
George Orwell
Patrick Hamilton
Janet Frame
Andrea Dworkin
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Lyndon Johnson
DISLIKED
Patricia Highsmith
Huey P Long
Grace Metalious
George Washington
Harry for most of his life was the loud tattooed beefy obnoxious braggart in the bar who if he catches your eye might just pick a fight for no particular reason except that he’d already consumed a great deal of whiskey and beer. Before arriving at the bar that morning he’d got up at 5 am and started writing at 5.30, making sure he’d done his 500 words for the day before hitting the bars. He often lived in shacks without electricity whilst at the same time being a tenured professor at the University of Florida where he ran a rigorous creative writing course. As the decades rolled by, he became more an embodiment of Southern Gothic than a real person.
(Harry’s fights, by the way, mostly ended with his being beat up – “despite all his experience, his karate training, his time in the gym, and his intimidating presence, he usually managed to come out on the losing end.”)
SOMETHING THAT RAISED MY EYEBROWS
His first novel The Gospel Singer was published in 1968 and none other than Elvis Presley read it and “envisioned himself in the title role”, says Ted Geltner. Colonel Tom Parker vetoed the idea, no surprise, and Elvis
Still thought the book was Hollywood material and passed the idea on to a friend and disciple of his, Tom Jones.
Ted tells us that Tom also read The Gospel Singer and also “saw the potential in Harry’s book and decided it was his ticket into film production”. So a meeting was arranged and Harry met Tom Jones, where it seems “Tom was even more smitten with Sally [Harry’s wife] than he had been with the book”. (Yes, it’s that kind of biography.) Anyway, Tom bought the rights but then no movie ever got made. Whether The Bee Gees ever read The Gospel Singer is not stated.
HARRY’S STRANGE CAREER
Harry’s career was like this : day job as creative writing teacher at the university – this paid peanuts. More importantly, madly productive novelist (eight novels in eight years). All his eventually 15 novels didn’t sell. The reviews were mostly excellent and he often made the “notable books of the year” lists but the public never caught on and after selling 3000 copies they all went out of print, and most of them are still out of print. Harry thought he was writing Literature with a capital L (and I think I agree). He didn’t care if his books sold or not. But somebody had to pay for his vast intake of alcohol, so he wrote a lot of screenplays for movies that got optioned but never produced – that was his biggest earner. Then finally, for ten years or so, he was the go-to in-depth reporting guy for Playboy and Esquire. They loved his penchant for horrible places where horrible things happened.
WHAT HAPPENS IN CHAPTER 30
He opens Norman Mailer’s latest novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance and sees his name mentioned by a character
Lydia Lunch, lead singer of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, forms an all-female band called Harry Crews. When Harry hears their music he really hates it.
Sonic Youth invite him to a concert & he meets the band.
Madonna becomes a fan and invites him to the upcoming heavyweight fight between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks. He meets Sean Penn who was married to Madonna at the time (how could I have forgotten that?) and Sean naturally wants to do a movie from Harry’s latest book. And on and on it goes.
But then the interest from these famous people wanes and Harry ends up drunk, broke and sprawled on the floor of his no-electricity shack in the woods.
TWO TYPICAL ANECDOTES
At Laurel Falls, right near the Tennessee-North Carolina border, Harry dropped acid with a suicidal Vietnam vet whom, later that evening, he saved from diving off the falls to his death by delivering an Okinawan reverse roundhouse kick, which he remembered from his karate training.
On the last day of class, Harry showed up completely drunk, dressed from head to toe in a gorilla suit, toting a basket filled with bananas. He jumped up on his desk, thumped his chest, and scratched his backside. Then, one by one, he began pulling bananas off the bunch and throwing them at the students as they stared up at him in disbelief. “Life is just a bunch of bananas!” Harry bellowed.
Well, he might have been a pain in the ass, but I bet there's never been another author who could execute an Okinawan reverse roundhouse kick.
LIKED
George Orwell
Patrick Hamilton
Janet Frame
Andrea Dworkin
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Lyndon Johnson
DISLIKED
Patricia Highsmith
Huey P Long
Grace Metalious
George Washington
Harry for most of his life was the loud tattooed beefy obnoxious braggart in the bar who if he catches your eye might just pick a fight for no particular reason except that he’d already consumed a great deal of whiskey and beer. Before arriving at the bar that morning he’d got up at 5 am and started writing at 5.30, making sure he’d done his 500 words for the day before hitting the bars. He often lived in shacks without electricity whilst at the same time being a tenured professor at the University of Florida where he ran a rigorous creative writing course. As the decades rolled by, he became more an embodiment of Southern Gothic than a real person.
(Harry’s fights, by the way, mostly ended with his being beat up – “despite all his experience, his karate training, his time in the gym, and his intimidating presence, he usually managed to come out on the losing end.”)
SOMETHING THAT RAISED MY EYEBROWS
His first novel The Gospel Singer was published in 1968 and none other than Elvis Presley read it and “envisioned himself in the title role”, says Ted Geltner. Colonel Tom Parker vetoed the idea, no surprise, and Elvis
Still thought the book was Hollywood material and passed the idea on to a friend and disciple of his, Tom Jones.
Ted tells us that Tom also read The Gospel Singer and also “saw the potential in Harry’s book and decided it was his ticket into film production”. So a meeting was arranged and Harry met Tom Jones, where it seems “Tom was even more smitten with Sally [Harry’s wife] than he had been with the book”. (Yes, it’s that kind of biography.) Anyway, Tom bought the rights but then no movie ever got made. Whether The Bee Gees ever read The Gospel Singer is not stated.
HARRY’S STRANGE CAREER
Harry’s career was like this : day job as creative writing teacher at the university – this paid peanuts. More importantly, madly productive novelist (eight novels in eight years). All his eventually 15 novels didn’t sell. The reviews were mostly excellent and he often made the “notable books of the year” lists but the public never caught on and after selling 3000 copies they all went out of print, and most of them are still out of print. Harry thought he was writing Literature with a capital L (and I think I agree). He didn’t care if his books sold or not. But somebody had to pay for his vast intake of alcohol, so he wrote a lot of screenplays for movies that got optioned but never produced – that was his biggest earner. Then finally, for ten years or so, he was the go-to in-depth reporting guy for Playboy and Esquire. They loved his penchant for horrible places where horrible things happened.
WHAT HAPPENS IN CHAPTER 30
He opens Norman Mailer’s latest novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance and sees his name mentioned by a character
Lydia Lunch, lead singer of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, forms an all-female band called Harry Crews. When Harry hears their music he really hates it.
Sonic Youth invite him to a concert & he meets the band.
Madonna becomes a fan and invites him to the upcoming heavyweight fight between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks. He meets Sean Penn who was married to Madonna at the time (how could I have forgotten that?) and Sean naturally wants to do a movie from Harry’s latest book. And on and on it goes.
But then the interest from these famous people wanes and Harry ends up drunk, broke and sprawled on the floor of his no-electricity shack in the woods.
TWO TYPICAL ANECDOTES
At Laurel Falls, right near the Tennessee-North Carolina border, Harry dropped acid with a suicidal Vietnam vet whom, later that evening, he saved from diving off the falls to his death by delivering an Okinawan reverse roundhouse kick, which he remembered from his karate training.
On the last day of class, Harry showed up completely drunk, dressed from head to toe in a gorilla suit, toting a basket filled with bananas. He jumped up on his desk, thumped his chest, and scratched his backside. Then, one by one, he began pulling bananas off the bunch and throwing them at the students as they stared up at him in disbelief. “Life is just a bunch of bananas!” Harry bellowed.
Well, he might have been a pain in the ass, but I bet there's never been another author who could execute an Okinawan reverse roundhouse kick.
April 22, 2018
This is a very good read!!! Pick up a copy today!!!
May 30, 2016
I first heard of Harry Crews from Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon in 1987, who suggested reading "A Feast of Snakes" first. I did and subsequently found all go his books in hardcover at the Long Beach, CA library. Before reading a second one, I looked at each dust jacket fold for his photo, and I was amazed at the remarkable difference from book to book. So I read them in succession. I was working with Sonic Youth at the time. That year, the band played in Gainesville FL for the first time, and I often worked with a local cable tv music program "Double Helix" to promote band videos. I pitched them on having Kim interview Harry and we set it up. The best part of it was that I spoke with Harry a number of times by phone about Tony Joe White, Faulkner, Larry Brown, Madison Jones, Kerouac, and the funny logistics I had to arrange for the interview to happen. The interview was fine, but he hated the music and called me the next day telling me never to call him again with shitty music projects. About a week later, he sent me a b&w promo photo of him unsigned and without a note. So, I could not pout this book down. It is a warm, funny and gut wrenching portrait of true master.
August 1, 2016
Harry Crews was a larger than life figure who played a key role in the development of "Southern Literature" in the second half of the 20th Century. By authoring 16 novels that came to define "Southern Gothic Literature", one of the best autobiographies ever written, and a series of insightful articles published in Playboy and Esquire (among others), Crews , the son of a Georgia sharecropper came to national attention in the late 1960's, 70's and 80's.
Unfortunately for Crews, his excessive behavior, drug taking, and alcoholism became part of his legend even as he befriended celebrities of that period including Charles Bronson, Shawn Penn, and Madonna.
This footnoted biography is well written and well researched, and to a large degree ties together Harry Crews's professional and social life and includes some relevant literary criticism, although for some reason this is primarily focused on his earlier novels.
Best of all, this biography reads like a story, making it much more readable than a typical dry biography.
This is fitting because , as most of us who knew him can attest, there was little dry and boring about Harry Crews.
Unfortunately for Crews, his excessive behavior, drug taking, and alcoholism became part of his legend even as he befriended celebrities of that period including Charles Bronson, Shawn Penn, and Madonna.
This footnoted biography is well written and well researched, and to a large degree ties together Harry Crews's professional and social life and includes some relevant literary criticism, although for some reason this is primarily focused on his earlier novels.
Best of all, this biography reads like a story, making it much more readable than a typical dry biography.
This is fitting because , as most of us who knew him can attest, there was little dry and boring about Harry Crews.
June 20, 2023
4.5 stars. I thought this was a well told biography of a complicated and fascinating man. My only complaint was that sometimes it was hard to nail down what year the author was writing about—he went back and forth in time a bit confusingly at times.
August 9, 2021
Although biographies are not my usual thing, this was a great book! Harry Crews was an accomplished author and quite the character!
March 13, 2017
This is an amazing, engrossing biography of the ultimate Florida man writer, Harry Crews. It's not a quick read, by any means, because there are stunning anecdotes on nearly every page that each take a while to digest. I think it took me a couple of months to get through it all, but it was well worth it.
Crews was the cantankerous, frequently unhinged creative writing teacher at the University of Florida for years, a position he earned by cranking out novel after novel full of freaks and obsessive wingnuts, starting with "The Gospel Singer." He wrote about snake handlers, hawk trainers, karate competitors, body builders, old people and even a guy who eats an entire car.
In Ted Geltner's masterful bio, though, Crews comes across as far more than just that caricature of the Florida wild man. He was a sickly and, quite possibly, abused child in Georgia who grew up in extreme poverty. A childhood illness made him sympathize with the freaks of the world more than anyone else, and his rural upbringing made his later success into something of a curse as it pulled him from his roots. He was a binge-drunk who got into fights he couldn't win, an academic suspicious of academia, a writer who was a master behind the typewriter but a mess everywhere else. Geltner, clearly a fan, does not shy away from the scenes that show Crews at his lowest and worst ebb.
But he also shows him in times when he was riding high -- for instance, traveling along with Madonna and Sean Penn to see the Tyson-Spinks fight, or hanging out with Charles Bronson on the set of the movie "Breakheart Pass." He tells in excruciatingly funny detail the story of how Crews reported and wrote about an Alaskan oil boom town, saving the punchline for when he turns in his expenses to his editor.
Geltner enjoyed great access to Crews before he died, and made good use of the Crews archive of letters and other documents at the University of Georgia, giving us a rare insight into the tortured soul whose one abiding rule for anyone who wanted to be a writer was a simple phrase: Put your ass in the chair.
Crews was the cantankerous, frequently unhinged creative writing teacher at the University of Florida for years, a position he earned by cranking out novel after novel full of freaks and obsessive wingnuts, starting with "The Gospel Singer." He wrote about snake handlers, hawk trainers, karate competitors, body builders, old people and even a guy who eats an entire car.
In Ted Geltner's masterful bio, though, Crews comes across as far more than just that caricature of the Florida wild man. He was a sickly and, quite possibly, abused child in Georgia who grew up in extreme poverty. A childhood illness made him sympathize with the freaks of the world more than anyone else, and his rural upbringing made his later success into something of a curse as it pulled him from his roots. He was a binge-drunk who got into fights he couldn't win, an academic suspicious of academia, a writer who was a master behind the typewriter but a mess everywhere else. Geltner, clearly a fan, does not shy away from the scenes that show Crews at his lowest and worst ebb.
But he also shows him in times when he was riding high -- for instance, traveling along with Madonna and Sean Penn to see the Tyson-Spinks fight, or hanging out with Charles Bronson on the set of the movie "Breakheart Pass." He tells in excruciatingly funny detail the story of how Crews reported and wrote about an Alaskan oil boom town, saving the punchline for when he turns in his expenses to his editor.
Geltner enjoyed great access to Crews before he died, and made good use of the Crews archive of letters and other documents at the University of Georgia, giving us a rare insight into the tortured soul whose one abiding rule for anyone who wanted to be a writer was a simple phrase: Put your ass in the chair.
July 31, 2016
As readable as a novel, this biography of Harry Crews brings to life his persistence and achievement as a writer. Crews, a legendary drunk and brawler, was a serious and powerful writer, and makes a character as absorbing as his many fictional ones.
Geltner illuminates Crews's feeling and ethos of remaining a lifelong outsider. I learned much I didn't know from reading Crews's memoir and articles about him, including more sources of his apparent pain. Especially the sexual assaults he suffered as a boy, hitchhiking, and at the hands of his older brother. Crews comes off as a tortured man who managed to save himself through work that gave to the world a gift.
Geltner illuminates Crews's feeling and ethos of remaining a lifelong outsider. I learned much I didn't know from reading Crews's memoir and articles about him, including more sources of his apparent pain. Especially the sexual assaults he suffered as a boy, hitchhiking, and at the hands of his older brother. Crews comes off as a tortured man who managed to save himself through work that gave to the world a gift.
November 13, 2025
Took me a while to read this one, not because of the subject matter, as Crews did his level best to be a larger-than-life character, but due to the inadequacies of the author. Geltner gives this tale no air, he strangles Crews' bibliography with plenty of irrelevant and repetitive detail, while cribbing mercilessly (lifting entire sentences from A Childhood, for instance), and not even caring to get names right (Crews consistently spelled his brother's name as Hoyet, not Hoyett, as Geltner has it) (and there's no such Bronson movie as Brakeheart Pass, either). A sad waste of an excellent subject.
August 20, 2017
Crews was not an admirable character- often drunken and violent, but none-the-less very talented. He was made in the Hemingway/ Bukowski mode of the typical alcoholic/ tortured writer-- I want to think that it was his imagination that won out on the page. I like to read his stuff and read about him, but I am glad I didn't know him personally. He was also a professor at the University of Florida for many years and was known for his wild antics.
Read
March 7, 2021This book was great. I learned a lot about Crews' early years. Didn't realize he'd been a professor for so long. How weird would it be to have Harry fuckin' Crews be your college professor. Not necessarily a positive experience - just weird.
August 19, 2016
I think the biggest complaint I had about this was Harry Crews was such a larger than life character, but all his shenanigans were described in a pretty tame an undramatic manner, which didn't really give me much. I felt like I got far more out of and a better understanding of him reading a collection of some of his essays from Grits or of course Childhood.
Another complaint I have is the chronology would sometimes jump to follow a topic rather than his life in order, which was confusing. Also, sometimes events were referred later in the bio passingly that sounded like they should have been at least been mentioned earlier.
Probably wouldn't recommend reading this unless you are a really, really hardcore Crews fan. You get a better sense of the man from his writing.
Another complaint I have is the chronology would sometimes jump to follow a topic rather than his life in order, which was confusing. Also, sometimes events were referred later in the bio passingly that sounded like they should have been at least been mentioned earlier.
Probably wouldn't recommend reading this unless you are a really, really hardcore Crews fan. You get a better sense of the man from his writing.
May 2, 2016
This is an excellent biography of one of the more influential US authors in recent times. Most authors' lives aren't actually that entertaining. Not so Crews! Geltner brings the humour and danger of the man to life in vivid fashion. This is a well written book with short chapters and some interesting photos (although I'd have liked to see a photo of Crews' sons, too). Full review here:
https://guysalvidge.wordpress.com/201...
https://guysalvidge.wordpress.com/201...
May 23, 2016
An outstanding biography about a phenomenal writer. Does justice to the great man himself.
July 8, 2016
Very enjoyable and well written and researched bio of an author that not everyone is going to admire and enjoy. It makes me want to re-read Crews' work.
December 6, 2016
Crews sure seemed like a jerk. I am not going to give him a pass because of a difficult childhood.
July 8, 2017
I read about 85 pages of this biography and then set it aside as I focused on something "shinier". Months later I returned to it and in a few successive days completed this wonderfully insightful tome about the life and career of one my favorite authors, Harry Crews.
Crews was a prolific writer of mostly fiction. In his most productive years he was turning out a novel a year, committed to a morning routine of getting down at least 500 words in his current project. Although he was far from successful as a husband and a father, and only marginally successful as a professor, he was 100% devoted to his writing.
It appears that individual fans of Crews have their favorite novels. I began with A Feast of Snakes, which blew my mind, and would rank a much later book, Body, as his most accomplished work of fiction - though I have yet to make it through all of his titles. Most readers, including myself, think his memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, is one the finest autobiographies ever published. It is outstanding.
His subject matter is, by turns, funny, frightening, grotesque, violent, poignant, dark and explicitly sexual. Not for everyone by any means, but he has drawn to him a loyal readership that appreciates his excellent prose and fascinating point of view, despite the sometimes unsavory plot lines and characters.
Geltner has undertaken an exhaustive and I imagine exhausting project here, and Crews aficionados will be generously rewarded with detailed examinations of the events surrounding Crews' writing and publishing trials and tribulations, and the relationships that kept him afloat throughout his frequently self-destructive life, fueled by alcoholic binges, street and prescription drug abuse, and the propensity to land in a fist fight while defending some perceived wrong. The author called upon a bevy of living resources to help tell this story, and I commend his tremendous efforts in bringing awareness to this never-dull character.
Crews was a prolific writer of mostly fiction. In his most productive years he was turning out a novel a year, committed to a morning routine of getting down at least 500 words in his current project. Although he was far from successful as a husband and a father, and only marginally successful as a professor, he was 100% devoted to his writing.
It appears that individual fans of Crews have their favorite novels. I began with A Feast of Snakes, which blew my mind, and would rank a much later book, Body, as his most accomplished work of fiction - though I have yet to make it through all of his titles. Most readers, including myself, think his memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, is one the finest autobiographies ever published. It is outstanding.
His subject matter is, by turns, funny, frightening, grotesque, violent, poignant, dark and explicitly sexual. Not for everyone by any means, but he has drawn to him a loyal readership that appreciates his excellent prose and fascinating point of view, despite the sometimes unsavory plot lines and characters.
Geltner has undertaken an exhaustive and I imagine exhausting project here, and Crews aficionados will be generously rewarded with detailed examinations of the events surrounding Crews' writing and publishing trials and tribulations, and the relationships that kept him afloat throughout his frequently self-destructive life, fueled by alcoholic binges, street and prescription drug abuse, and the propensity to land in a fist fight while defending some perceived wrong. The author called upon a bevy of living resources to help tell this story, and I commend his tremendous efforts in bringing awareness to this never-dull character.
June 19, 2020
Really great, comprehensive biography of on of the most under-rated geniuses of American fiction. Whilst Crews books are quite pulpy in nature, his caustic, comic and instense vision of America is unparalled. Geltner is an excellent writer, and goes into Crews life in great detail. Crews worked hard from a poor background, to become a true American intellectual, as a lecturer he inspired thousands of budding (and failed) writers, but throughout his life was completely committed to his art as an artist and importantly as a teacher. It was interesting that he was quite 'successful' during the late 60s and throughout the 70s, to the extent that Elvis was interested in being the 'gospel singer', Tom Jones bought the rights to the novel (!), and he was often hired by Hollywood to write scripts that sadly never eventuated, he worked quite extensively with Michael Cimino. He also has a regular gig as a staff writer for Playboy magazine, which would have added to his counter-cultural cache. He had a colourful, often sad life, burdened by his guilt for not being a responsible father. He seemed to self-medicate his guilt with a shocking alcohol habit, coupled with copious pot, coke, meth and occasional heroin use, but his drinking was the biggest burden on his life. He was also a fitness freak! Anyway, the works speak for themselves, and the mysterious sequel to his classic memoir 'A childhood' is the 'Rosebud' in this great, great biography.
December 21, 2017
This book arrived yesterday and after dinner, I sat down to read - anticipating an hour or two of reading. I could not put this book down. I read 'til 4:30 am and got up to finish the last chapter this morning! I have long been a "fan" of Harry Crews and was looking forward to this biography. The author, Ted Geltner, did a superb job with this biography. He takes the complicated, likable, drunken, bar fighting (he actually would fight just about anywhere despite usually being on the losing side of most fights), genius, author Harry Crews and skillfully takes us forward and backward through Crews life with great skill. Even if I was not already familiar with Harry Crews, I would love this book. It is well written, engaging, at times disturbing. I recommend this book highly. If you are not familiar with the incredible "Southern Gothic" work of Crews - read this book and then go out and get every book Crews ever wrote. He has been compared to Faulkner and O'Connor and other great writers. Not for the faint of heart. Some blood, lots of booze, drugs, confrontation, and pain with a full measure of pure genius... this book tells the story of a great writer very well.
May 6, 2017
This is such a life story that, once completed, I want to return and reread from the beginning. I'm going to seek out a copy of Crews' memoir, A Childhood. A panel discussion with the author at Margaret Mitchell House in Midtown Atlanta takes place May 17, 2017; info, here: https://www.facebook.com/events/37267...
There is a lot of bad behavior all around here, and trauma, increasingly from Crews himself, and the author wades in with a pretty even hand, it seems to me. I want to know more about fellow Creative Writing prof Smith Kirkpatrick abandoning his office at UF to pigeons. I wondered if author Geltner encountered singer/songwriter and UF writing teacher Don Grooms before his death, mid-1990s. There is a lot of Gainesville, Florida and North Florida in this book, a place I loved to visit.
But I have missed Crews up until this point, and now he is fully on my radar screen.
Highly recommended.
There is a lot of bad behavior all around here, and trauma, increasingly from Crews himself, and the author wades in with a pretty even hand, it seems to me. I want to know more about fellow Creative Writing prof Smith Kirkpatrick abandoning his office at UF to pigeons. I wondered if author Geltner encountered singer/songwriter and UF writing teacher Don Grooms before his death, mid-1990s. There is a lot of Gainesville, Florida and North Florida in this book, a place I loved to visit.
But I have missed Crews up until this point, and now he is fully on my radar screen.
Highly recommended.
September 19, 2024
As a big fan of Harry Crews, I hoped this book would tell us about the man behind the books he wrote. Not only did this book not disappoint, but it also exceeded my wildest expectations. Harry Crews wrote some remarkable fiction, but his nonfiction autobiography, Childhood, The Memoir of a Place, is among the finest books I have ever read. What I didn't know was that Crew's life was even crazier than his books. The biography made me sad for Harry Crews. A kid who grew up in extreme poverty, plagued by polio and burns that nearly killed him, was troubled for the remainder of his life. He was bigger than life, and this book shows you what his life was really like. I can't recommend this biography enough.
March 9, 2022
I was a committed reader of Harry Crews' writing before I read this biography, but now I am more committed still. I learned to appreciate Crews' dedication to the discipline of writing, to the discipline of encouraging students of fiction, and to the central place literature held in his life. He failed in most other areas of his life. He was a tortured soul, obviously. But when he was at his acerbic and linguistic best, his words penetrate your marrow. Geltner did a fine job here of being honest and fair in his bio of Bacon County, Georgia's under-appreciated literary titan.
July 6, 2017
Reading the details of this brilliant writer's tragic life is every bit as unnerving and captivating as reading his novels. Knowing the details of the pain and tragedy in Harry's life reveals a lot of insight into his fiction.
Ted Geltner, a former writer for the Gainesville Sun who knew Harry for years, deserves some kind of literary prize for his accomplishment. He knocked it out of the ball park.
Ted Geltner, a former writer for the Gainesville Sun who knew Harry for years, deserves some kind of literary prize for his accomplishment. He knocked it out of the ball park.
May 18, 2021
I loved reading his story because it is so gritty and real and Southern. And because I was there at so many of the times and places mentioned. His life was tragic and I feel for him. I also feel the author of this biography described a lot of sexual abuse young women suffered at his hands and basically excused him for it. How many young women aspiring to be writers were traumatized by his actions? I think this issue deserve more consideration.
April 26, 2022
This excellent biography reveals how interlaced Crews' writing was with his real life adventure. You understand much better how he was able to bring his grit characters to such brilliant life on the page once you get a peek into how he lived. It's a biography that opens up Crews' genius. There was so much going on, I expect this biography will require another visit in a few years to catch something I may have missed in a single read.
December 21, 2023
I first read Harry Crews when I was 19 years old (The Gypsy's Curse), and was immediately hooked, reading his books through the eighties and nineties as they were released as well as his back catalog.
From his dirt-poor upbringing in Georgia, as described in "A Childhood", to his hard-drinking, drug-fueled days as a professor at the University of Florida, Ted Geltner presents a warts-and-all portrait of the artist in this superb biography.
From his dirt-poor upbringing in Georgia, as described in "A Childhood", to his hard-drinking, drug-fueled days as a professor at the University of Florida, Ted Geltner presents a warts-and-all portrait of the artist in this superb biography.
January 7, 2025
Maybe sometimes it’s better not to know the intricacies of an artists life. This book was full of fun little anecdotes and a lot of interesting passages about crews but it also was a tragic depiction of a broken man who broke others along the way. There was more on his personal life (including some less than questionable things he did) than the gestation of his novels. I did like that his artistic process was simply “get your ass in the chair.”
August 22, 2019
bela biografia de um dos grandes autores americanos do final do séc. xx. fica-se a perceber melhor o homem, que era complicado para dizer apenas uma palavra, e muitas das suas motivações enquanto escritor. e conclui-se que a sua própria vida poderia mesmo ter sido uma novela por si escrita - com um daqueles personagens maiores que qualquer ficção.
August 28, 2017
Well researched and well written. Mr. Crews is definitely larger than life and a huge throwback. Would have liked more insight into each of his works as some seemed to get short shrift. Nice read on an, in my opinion, overlooked southern writer.
September 21, 2017
I am so glad I found out about Harry Crews, but the book got a little long in the tooth. Harry's story is great and I can't wait to read his books. Why 3 vs 4? The story became too repetitious. I understand appreciate that it was Harry's life and it had to be told, but it was too much.
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