Perspectives on Harry Crews
Perspectives on Harry Crews

Author: Erik Bledsoe

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2001-02-19

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1578063221

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A look into the poor-white world of one of the South's spellbinding storytellers

A Childhood
A Childhood

Author: Harry Crews

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0143135333

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“One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written” –The New Yorker The highly acclaimed memoir of one of the most original American storytellers of the rural South A Penguin Classic Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way. Interweaving his own memories including his bout with polio and a fascination with the Sears, Roebuck catalog, with the tales of relatives and friends, he re-creates a childhood of tenderness and violence, comedy and tragedy.

Getting Naked with Harry Crews
Getting Naked with Harry Crews

Author: Harry Crews

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 9780813017099

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Harry Crews on getting naked: "If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told. . . . If you're gonna write fiction, you have to get right on down to it." "Harry Crews cannot refrain from storytelling. These conversations are blessed with countless insights into the creative process, fresh takes on old questions, and always, Crews's stories: modern-day parables that tell us how it is to live, to work, and to hurt."--Jeff Baker, Oxford American "Harry Crews has indelible ways of approaching life and the craft of writing. This collection shows that he elevates both to a near-religious artform."--Matthew Teague, Oxford American In 26 interviews conducted between 1972 and 1997, novelist Harry Crews tells the truth--about why and how he writes, about the literary influences on his own work, about the writers he admires (or does not), about which of his own books he likes (or does not), about his fascination with so-called freaks, and about his love of blood sports. Crews reveals the tender side under his tough-guy image, discussing his beloved mother and his spiritual quest in a secular world. Crews also speaks frankly about his failed relationships, the role that writing played in them, and his personal struggles with alcohol and drugs and their impact on his life and work. Those seeking insights into his work will find them in these interviews. Those seeking to be entertained in Crewsian fashion will not be disappointed. Harry Crews on his tattoo and mohawk . . . "If you can't get past my 'too'--my tattoo--and my 'do'--the way I got my hair cut--it's only because you have decided there are certain things that can be done with hair and certain things that cannot be done with hair. And certain of them are right and proper and decent, and the rest indicate a warped, degenerate nature; therefore I am warped and degenerate. 'Cause I got my hair cut a different way, man? You gonna really live your life like that? What's wrong with you?" On advice to young writers . . . "You have to go to considerable trouble to live differently from the way the world wants you to live. That's what I've discovered about writing. The world doesn't want you to do a damn thing. If you wait till you got time to write a novel or time to write a story or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read--if you wait for the time, you'll never do it. 'Cause there ain't no time; world don't want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week." On being "well-rounded" . . . "I never wanted to be well-rounded, and I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design." Harry Crews is the author of 23 books, including The Gospel Singer, Naked in Garden Hills, This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven, Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, Car, The Hawk Is Dying, The Gypsy's Curse, A Feast of Snakes, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Blood and Grits, The Enthusiast, All We Need of Hell, The Knockout Artist, Body, Scar Lover, The Mulching of America, Celebration, and Florida Frenzy (UPF, 1982). Erik Bledsoe is an instructor of English and American studies at the University of Tennessee. He has published articles on southern writers and edited a special issue of the Southern Quarterly devoted to Crews. His 1997 interview with Harry Crews from that magazine is included in this collection.

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction
The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

Author: Martyn Bone

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2005-06-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780807130537

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For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place? Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South. Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.

Florida Frenzy
Florida Frenzy

Author: Harry Crews

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9780813007267

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"Fourteen essays and articles and three short stories that will hit you right between the eyes. Crews writing is informed by a deep love of language, literature, nature, blood sports, and his own kind of people--namely rural, southern, hard-drinking, honest-measure hell-raisers. We are all lucky to have him to tell us about cockfighting, dogfighting, mending an injured hawk, becoming a great jockey, poaching gators, and taking ourselves much too seriously"--Chicago Tribune "The author's gifts include an elegant and easy style, a knack for telling a good story, and a wry and riotous sense of humor. . . . Unforgettable characters whose preoccupations evoke such memorable detail. Despite the concreteness of his descriptions, his sports cronies and the bar rats he encounters take on a universality in his graceful prose."--Newsday In this collection of fiction and essays, Crews focuses on the people and places of Florida--full of natural wonders and other, grimier delights that make perfect grist for his forceful style, Southern Gothic sensibilities, and rowdy sense of humor. From poaching gators, to the Gatornationals, to cockfighting--a must-have collection for Harry Crews fans new and old.

A Wing and a Prayer
A Wing and a Prayer

Author: Harry H. Crosby

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1504067320

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“A compelling account of the air war against Germany” written by the navigator portrayed by Anthony Boyle in Apple TV’s Masters of the Air (Publishers Weekly). They began operations out of England in the spring of ’43. They flew their Flying Fortresses almost daily against strategic targets in Europe in the name of freedom. Their astonishing courage and appalling losses earned them the name that resounds in the annals of aerial warfare and made the “Bloody Hundredth” a legend. Harry H. Crosby—depicted in the miniseries Masters of the Air developed by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—arrived with the very first crews, and left with the very last. After dealing with his fear and gaining in skill and confidence, he was promoted to Group Navigator, surviving hairbreadth escapes and eluding death while leading thirty-seven missions, some of them involving two thousand aircraft. Now, in a breathtaking and often humorous account, he takes us into the hearts and minds of these intrepid airmen to experience both the triumph and the white-knuckle terror of the war in the skies. “Affecting . . . A vivid account . . . Uncommonly thoughtful recollections that address the moral ambiguities of a great cause without in any way denigrating the selfless valor or camaraderie that helped ennoble it.” —Kirkus Reviews “Re-creates for us the sense of how it was when European skies were filled with noise and danger, when the fate of millions hung in the balance. An evocative and excellent memoir.” —Library Journal “The acrid stench of fear and cordite, the coal burning stoves, the heroics, the losses . . . This has to be the best memoir I have read, bar none.” —George Hicks, director of the Airmen Memorial Museum

Twentieth-Century Southern Literature
Twentieth-Century Southern Literature

Author: J. A. BryantJr.

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-11-21

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 0813187400

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Authors discussed include: Wendell Berry, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Zora Neal Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, and many more. By World War II, the Southern Renaissance had established itself as one of the most significant literary events of the century, and today much of the best American fiction is southern fiction. Though the flowering of realistic and local-color writing during the first two decades of the century was a sign of things to come, the period between the two world wars was the crucial one for the South's literary development: a literary revival in Richmond came to fruition; at Vanderbilt University a group of young men produced The Fugitive, a remarkable, controversial magazine that published some of the century's best verse in its brief run; and the publication and widespread recognition of Faulkner (among others) inaugurated the great flood of southern writing that was to follow in novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. With more than forty years of experience writing and reading about the subject, and friendships with many of the figures discussed, J. A. Bryant is uniquely qualified to provide the first comprehensive account of southern American literature since 1900. Bryant pays attention to both the cultural and the historical context of the works and authors discussed, and presents the information in an enjoyable, accessible style. No lover of great American literature can afford to be without this book.

After Southern Modernism
After Southern Modernism

Author: Matthew Guinn

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2011-06-14

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1604738898

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The literature of the contemporary South might best be understood for its discontinuity with the literary past. At odds with traditions of the Southern Renascence, southern literature of today sharply refutes the Nashville Agrarians and shares few of Faulkner's and Welty's concerns about place, community, and history. This sweeping study of the literary South's new direction focuses on nine well established writers who, by breaking away from the firmly ensconced myths, have emerged as an iconoclastic generation- -- Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah. Resisting the modernist methods of the past, they have established their own postmodern ground beyond the shadow of their predecessors. This shift in authorial perspective is a significant indicator of the future of southern writing. Crews's seminal role as a ground-breaking "poor white" author, Mason's and Crews's portrayals of rural life, and Allison's and Brown's frank portrayals of the lower class pose a challenge to traditional depictions of the South. The dissenting voices of Gibbons and Kenan, who focus on gender, race, and sexuality, create fiction that is at once identifiably "southern" and also distinctly subversive. Gibbons's iconoclastic stance toward patriarchy, like the outsider's critique of community found in Kenan's work, proffers a portrait of the South unprecedented in the region's literature. Ford, McCarthy, and Hannah each approach the South's traditional notions of history and community with new irreverence and treat familiar southern topics in a distinctly postmodern manner. Whether through Ford's generic consumer landscape, the haunted netherworld of McCarthy's southern novels, or Hannah's riotous burlesque of the Civil War, these authors assail the philosophical and cultural foundations from which the Southern Renascence arose. Challenging the conventional conceptions of the southern canon, this is a provocative and innovative contribution to the region's literary study.