"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?"

In Books and Publishing class we had to write a bio paper on a living author. Since most of my favorite authors are dead (Hjortsberg, Shiner, and Crews a few among the living), I picked ol' Harry Crews, which I would. The complete first draft of this had about four more pages of his actual biography, but that made it far too long to be turned in. A quite chop-chop job and it was left to this.


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(1st Draft)


CRW 321 - 001
January 27, 2009
Author Case History


"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?"


Harry Crews is an unusual author who is linked in an essential manner to the particular place of his youth. This is immediately evident in the title of his published memoir, Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Harry was born in Bacon County, Georgia, a place where men would shoot each other over disagreements about fence lines and coon hounds. At a time when the rest of the country was just beginning to suffer the effects of the Great Depression, folks in Bacon County had been living that way for more than a few generations. Prospects looked bleak, and, if the crops failed, families were destitute.

At the age of 5, Harry suffered from a debilitating illness, one that would influence the rest of his life, and deeply reflect in his fiction. He contracted a fever accompanied by severe muscle contractions which would leave the county doctor to declare that Harry would never walk again. This declaration brought family and friends to his bedside, all staring at him in a disturbing way that would give Harry a unique perspective on how society viewed its peripheral elements, the people mainstream society called "freaks." The characters in Harry's fiction almost always displayed some deformity or grotesque trait (Crews, Childhood).

Harry described his father--a man who turned out to actually be his step-father--as a good man but a brutal drunk (Crews, Childhood). His mother eventually grew tired of his drunken tirades and packed up her family one night and made her way to Jacksonville, Florida, where Harry lived until he graduated high school.

He enlisted in the Marines, later commenting:

"Being good, southern, ignorant country boys, we did the good, southern, ignorant country thing: we volunteered as quickly as possible, anxious as we were to go and spill our blood in the good, southern, ignorant country way. (Introduction, Classic Crews 12)

It was during his three years in the Marines that he began to read everything he could.
Following his discharge he attended the University of Florida, where he first began writing fiction. He took a creative writing course with Andrew Lytle--formerly the teacher of Flannery O'Connor. Looking at one of Harry's early stories, Andrew Lytle told him he should burn the manuscript, saying, "Fire is a great refiner." (Goss, Pop Culture Florida 16)

A number of years later, after Harry had his first published novel, The Gospel Singer, he returned to the University of Florida as a teacher in the English department, where he taught for the next 29 years. During those three decades he published a total of 17 novels, a collection of fiction, an autobiography, and 4 collections of nonfiction. He was known by students and faculty alike as a hard-drinking, cantankerous man, who taught with the same fire and passion with which he wrote and displayed in his work. His life was always on the verge of overshadowing his fictional creations. He embodies the term Flannery O'Connor used to describe her own Southern characters, "a large and startling figure." (O'Connor)

The novels of Harry Crews could perhaps best be described as a sub-genre of the Southern Gothic. "Grit-Lit," as some critics have termed the work of Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and early Cormac McCarthy. Works that mix great amounts of violence, dark humor, salacious subject matter, and grotesque characters. Although not all of Harry's novels have these elements, they certainly all have at least two or three of them.

Having a life that seemed to be straight out of his own novels caused Harry no small amount of conflict with the academic hierarchy, as well as more than a few publishers, editors, and agents. His first five novels were all published by William Morrow, the next thirteen would be published by a total of seven different publishers. Only three of those seven were major houses; Alfred A. Knopf, Harper & Row, and Simon & Schuster. The main factors of his conflicts with publishers and editors could be seen in his refusal to cut particularly violence scenes or graphic subject matter such as rape, castration, and brutal dog fighting ("A Writer's Face", Georgia Review).

With his nonfiction work, Harry fared no better with publishers. In 1976, while on assignment to write an article for Playboy, Harry began one of his infamous drinking binges. When he woke up a few days later, he found a tattoo on a hinge in the the fold of his arm. He included the tattoo in his expenses billed to the magazine, much to the dismay and anger of the editor (Dennis Miller Show).

It has been almost three years since Harry Crews's last book. An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings was published in 2006 by Blood & Guts Press, a tiny publisher in Los Angeles. It was printed in three editions: 26 lettered and signed copies hand-bound in goatskin; 300 numbered and signed copies in quarter leather with handmade paper boards, and then 2,000 copies in trade hardcover (Sauve).

This small number of his latest book belies the cult following Harry Crews has generated over his career. He has been sought out by such Hollywood luminaries as Sean Penn (who Harry dedicated Scar Lover to), when he was married to Madonna. Punk legends Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch named a short-lived side-band after Harry, using his novels as titles for most of their songs. Harry Crews was also featured in the 2004 documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, in which he relates three stories from his youth in archetypal Crews-style; that is, grim and gruff and full of unsettling humor.

Even if American Family is to be the final published work in his lifetime, the impact Harry Crews has made on modern American literature will be felt far beyond the range of those who have actually read, or even heard of him.

Another of his tattoos features a quote from the poet e. e. cummings, capturing perfectly Harry's bold attitude and brash outlook on what remains of his life: Beneath a grinning skull are the words, How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?

When it comes time to meet him, I don't know if Mr. Death will really want to find out.


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A Selected Bibliography

Novels
An American Family: The Baby With the Curious Markings (2006)
Celebration (1998)
The Mulching of America (1995)
Classic Crews (1993)
Scar Lover (1992)
Body (1990)
The Knockout Artist (1988)
A Feast of Snakes (1976)
The Gypsy's Curse (1974)
The Hawk is Dying (1973)
Car (1972)
Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971)
This Thing Don't Lead To Heaven (1970)
Naked in Garden Hills (1969)
The Gospel Singer (1968)

Non-Fiction
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978)
Blood and Grits (1979)
Florida Frenzy (1982)
Madonna at Ringside (1991)

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Works Cited

"'A Writer's Face': The Letters of Harry Crews."

The Georgia Review Winter 2007.
Crews, Harry. Classic Crews.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

---. A Childhood: Biography of a Place.

Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Goss, James P. Pop Culture Florida.

Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press Inc, 2000.

Cummings, E. E. "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct."

The Dial Jan. 1920. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

Sauve, Damon. "Fiction: Novels."

A Large & Startling Figure:
The Harry Crews Online Bibliography.
Jan. 27, 2009.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

Dir. Andrew Douglas. 2003.

DVD. Anonymous Content, 2005.

The Dennis Miller Show. Fox Network. 4 Feb. 1992.
The Rough South of Harry Crews.

Dir. Gary Hawkins. 1991.

Videocassette.
North Carolina Public Television.

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