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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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 24 November 2024.]