Harry Eugene Crews (June 7, 1935 – March 28, 2012) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
Harry Crews was born June 7, 1935, during the Great Depression to two poor tenant farmers in Bacon County, Georgia.
Crews wrote in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place: "Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple.
While Crews was still a child, his mother left his stepfather, and he and his brother went with her to live in the Springfield section of Jacksonville, Florida.
Here, Crews became a student of Andrew Nelson Lytle, who had also taught Flannery O'Connor, and James Dickey.
After an unplanned pregnancy, Crews married Sally Ellis, who gave birth to his first son, Patrick Scott.
"I was obsessed to the point of desperation with becoming a writer," he wrote, "and, further, I lived with the conviction that I had gotten a late start toward that difficult goal…Consequently, perhaps I was impatient, irritable, and inattentive toward Sally as a young woman and mother.
In The Knockout Artist, a poor, Georgia-born boxer with a glass jaw knocks himself out at parties for money.
During his time writing for Esquire, he wrote a column called "Grits"[4] for fourteen months in the 1970s that covered such topics as cockfighting and dog fighting.
[5] Filled with rough experiences he had outside of urban life, "grits" became a term he used to describe the tough southern characters featured in his writing.
As his reputation grew, he became a favorite of Madonna, Sean Penn, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore.
Crews, is professor emeritus of English and Dramatic Writing at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.
Crews is considered a major influence, alongside Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah, along with later writers in the genre including Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and Donald Ray Pollock.
Larry Brown, one of the most celebrated writers in the genre, objected to the term "Grit Lit", but he dedicated his novel, Fay, to Crews, calling him "my uncle in all ways but blood.
Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader, defines the genre as "typically blue collar or working class, mostly small town, sometimes rural, occasionally but not always violent, usually but not necessarily Southern.
Harry Crews's experiences as a poor boy from Bacon County, Georgia, have made a major impact on his own stories.