Harry Crews

Martin Kich (Wright State University)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 7 Jun 1935
Died 28 Mar 2012
Activity 1968-2006

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Other

Autobiographer

Resources

Crews' Works

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Harry Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression in rural Georgia. For the farm families among whom he was raised, the national economic catastrophe was simply a shadow over their already desperate impoverishment. Many of Crews's preoccupations as a novelist can be traced to his formative experiences, recounted vividly in

A Childhood: A Biography of a Place

(1978). Many of his novels have been set in the rural South, and all of his novels feature characters who are rednecks. Crews manages to get inside of the psyches of these characters and to create if not empathy for them, then at least an understanding of them, even as he conveys their stunted sensibilities, their hardness and their violence. Having endured polio and a severe scalding before the age of six, Crews remained…

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651 words

Citation: Kich, Martin. "Harry Crews". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 January 2002; last revised 23 June 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1071, accessed 23 November 2024.]