Harry Crews is the author of ten books--eight novels (the first published in 1968), an autobiography, and a collection of magazine nonfiction pieces. He is one of the most original, prolific, uneven, and compelling novelists of the Southern post-Styron generation.

Crews's family were Georgia tenant farmers; their life, as he describes it in A Childhood (1978), was hard, sometimes brutal, stripped to the essentials. The restrictive realities of his early years figure prominently in his fiction. Things relentlessly go wrong, yet self-discipline and craftsmanship do not altogether fail; people suffer and die after struggling to make their lives mean something. Crews left his birthplace, Alma, Georgia, in 1953 for the U.S. Marine Corps, was discharged as a sergeant in 1956, received B.A. (1960) and M.S.Ed. (1962) degrees from the University of Florida, and has taught English since 1962, first at a junior college in Fort Lauderdale and then at the University...