Harry Crews’s memoir is “flawless, one of the finest ever written by an American,” cncep writes.
“Nobody asks what she heard,” Crews writes. “They know she’ll tell. The needles click over the thimbles in the stretching silence. Down on the floor we stop sucking and have the sugar tits caught between our teeth.” That “we” is Crews and two other young children, but it includes us, too, since the stories of how Crews learned to write are also fine demonstrations of how well he does it.
We all leave childhood behind, but we don’t all leave everything behind, as Crews did. First, his mother moved her sons a hundred miles south to Jacksonville, Florida; then Crews left for the Marine Corps, eventually attending the University of Florida on the G.I. Bill. After earning a graduate degree in education, he became a creative-writing professor and taught in Gainesville for thirty years.
Death was often—too often—the agent of plot in Crews’s novels, many of which don’t end so much as stop when the main character is murdered.
More than a few times in Crews’s life, it seemed like he was about to catch a lucky break. Elvis was going to play the lead in a film adaptation of “The Gospel Singer,” and when that didn’t work out Tom Jones bought the rights, but the movie was never made. Later, Madonna became interested in his work, as did Sean Penn, who gave him a cameo as a grieving father in “The Indian Runner,” but, despite hopes and rumors, they never adapted any of Crews’s books.
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