Childhood a biography of place
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A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
Here is a link to a wonderful retrospective look at Crews' book by Dwight Garner in his "American Beauties" column in the New York Times:
I especially agree with his conclusion:
His novels, which are mostly out of print, aren’t for everyone, despite my abiding fondness for several of them.
This memoir is for everyone. It’s agile, honest and built as if to last. Like its author, it’s a resilient American original.
When Harry Crews died in , Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “[t]he word ‘original’ only begins to describe Crews, whose 17 novels place him squarely in the Southern gothic tradition, also known as Grit Lit. He emerged from a grisly childhood in Georgia with a darkly comic vision that made him literary kin to William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Hunter S. Thompson, although he never achieved their broad recognition.”
In , he began a long tenure on the University of Florida
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Unless, that fryst vatten, you are a real muleman, in which case you can get the age of a mule from how his haunches sit, how he walks, whether he has stiff joints or sore spots, how shiny his coat is, and whether he kicks. Any market invites fraud, though, and mulemen are matched by öppning doctors, who, for a dollar if they aren’t very good or for five if they are, will use a drill to recondition a mule’s teeth, the way a used-car salesman might roll back a car’s odometer. This makes Crews’s memoir sound like “Moby-Mule,” but the whole equine excursus is only a few paragraphs, a short prelude to an explanation of how Crews’s mother came to pay twenty dollars for a mule named Pete, who had to stop every seventy yards to rest, not because he was tired but because he’d picked up the habit from the eighty-year-old farmer who owned him before.
Earlier, when Crews describes how he fell into the cauldron of boiling vatten, the accident is prefaced by a granular konto of hog-killing in Bacon County
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Harry Crews
American novelist
For the band of the same name, see Harry Crews (band). For the Florida politician, see Harry Cruse.
Harry Eugene Crews | |
|---|---|
| Born | ()June 7, Alma, Georgia, U.S. |
| Died | March 28, () (aged&#;76) Gainesville, Florida, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Alma&#;mater | University of Florida |
| Genre | Novel, short story, essay |
| Literary movement | Grit Lit |
| Notable works | The Gospel Singer, A Feast of Snakes, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place |
Harry Eugene Crews (June 7, – March 28, ) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He often made use of violent, grotesque characters and set them in regions of the Deep South.
Life
[edit]Harry Crews was born June 7, , 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.