Harry Crews dies at 76; Southern writer with darkly comic vision

[bemildred]

Harry Crews, a rough-hewn Southerner who drew a keen following with novels that describe a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of grotesques — characters who are tossed into rattlesnake pits, walk on their hands, croon lullabies to a skull and literally eat a car — died Wednesday in Gainesville, Fla. He was 76.

The cause was neuropathy, according to his former wife, Sally Crews.

The word "original" only begins to describe Crews, whose 17 novels place him squarely in the Southern gothic tradition, also known as Grit Lit. He emerged from a grisly childhood in Georgia with a darkly comic vision that made him literary kin to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Hunter S. Thompson, although he never achieved their broad recognition.

Sometimes critics faulted him for letting perversity run amok ("… it's all too much and still not quite enough," a 1998 Newsday review said of one of his novels), but he was admired for his spare style, black humor and fierce imagination.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-harry-crews-20120401,0,1537312.story

[mvccd1000]

1. Interesting...

... never heard of him or tried him. I'll look him up.

[bemildred]

2. Harry Crews and 'getting naked'

One night in Atlanta, my telephone rang. It was the novelist Harry Crews. He'd gotten into an altercation with airport security. Could I come and fetch him?

Although Harry was a big, rugged ex-Marine who could hold his own with his fists, he was a mess when my friend Frazier and I collected him from the curb at Hartsfield International. His face was scratched, and his clothes were filthy. After he collapsed onto the back seat of my car, he said his problems had started a day or two earlier in New York, where he'd been researching a story for Esquire about homeless people living in the subway system. He'd been beaten up and robbed. He managed to get onto a flight out, but while awaiting his connection in Atlanta to his home in Gainesville, Fla., he'd run afoul of the authorities.

As battered as Harry was, a couple of tugs from the bottle of Jack Daniel's I'd brought along for medicinal purposes revived him, and as we drove through the concrete and glass canyons of downtown Atlanta, he grabbed Frazier and me by the scruffs of our necks and exclaimed in his gravelly, Southern drawl: "Men such as us should never die!"

When news came late last week that Harry was dead — he succumbed to neuropathy (damage to his peripheral nerves) at 76 — I thought back to that night. To say that Harry was prone to trouble is an understatement. He rarely backed down from a fight. He drank too much. He never met an attractive woman he didn't try to seduce. Strange and sometimes terrible things simply happened to him, but he would have had it no other way. Only by exposing himself to the entirety of life, Harry told me when I profiled him for the Atlanta Journal & Constitution Magazine in 1977, could he write honestly about the world. He called his philosophy "getting naked," and if it led him into some jams, it also helped him to produce works of fiction that could take your breath away.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-oney-harry-crews-remembered-20120404,0,4133220.story

[Kazzzzon]

3. RIP

I read a book of his once, not bad.