Post by Carl LaFong on Jan 20, 2023 22:47:09 GMT
Harry Crews’s unsparing portrait of his often brutal upbringing in 1930s Georgia is a window into a lost world
If a cult writer’s aura endures long enough, their work might be elevated to Penguin Classics status. At leas, that’s what’s happened to Harry Crews, the author of many southern gothic novels populated by freaks and grotesques, including his most well-known novel, A Feast of Snakes. Born in Georgia in 1935, Crews died in 2012 and claimed to have sold only a few thousand books in hardback during his lifetime (a series of celebrity admirers including Sean Penn and Madonna failed to translate into mainstream popularity). Having published eight novels in as many years, beginning with The Gospel Singer in 1968, in his 40s Crews turned to nonfiction to recount his first six years alive and testify to “a way of life gone forever out of the world”. His memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place was first published in 1978 and is now reissued (along with The Gospel Singer) with a loving foreword by Tobias Wolff. In the US, there has been a corresponding surge of enthusiasm for Crews and his work, with the New Yorker recently describing A Childhood as “one of the finest memoirs ever written by an American”.
www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/16/a-childhood-the-biography-of-a-place-review-a-classic-of-the-deep-south
If a cult writer’s aura endures long enough, their work might be elevated to Penguin Classics status. At leas, that’s what’s happened to Harry Crews, the author of many southern gothic novels populated by freaks and grotesques, including his most well-known novel, A Feast of Snakes. Born in Georgia in 1935, Crews died in 2012 and claimed to have sold only a few thousand books in hardback during his lifetime (a series of celebrity admirers including Sean Penn and Madonna failed to translate into mainstream popularity). Having published eight novels in as many years, beginning with The Gospel Singer in 1968, in his 40s Crews turned to nonfiction to recount his first six years alive and testify to “a way of life gone forever out of the world”. His memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place was first published in 1978 and is now reissued (along with The Gospel Singer) with a loving foreword by Tobias Wolff. In the US, there has been a corresponding surge of enthusiasm for Crews and his work, with the New Yorker recently describing A Childhood as “one of the finest memoirs ever written by an American”.
www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/16/a-childhood-the-biography-of-a-place-review-a-classic-of-the-deep-south
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