The environment in which the young Crews lived was stark and bleak, full of all manner of suffering and hardships, though it also afforded moments of love, close family ties, and simple pleasures.
In 1953, at age seventeen, Crews enlisted in the Marine Corps, in which he served for three years. After his discharge in 1956 he enrolled at the University of Florida on the GI Bill. As he observed in a 1983 interview with Kay Bonetti, "I didn't go to the university because I thought somebody'd teach me how to write.... I went there because it was a place to be for four years, and I would get money from the government." Midway through his college career he took a year and a half off to see the country on his Triumph motorcycle.
In an autobiographical sketch included with his first novel, The Gospel Singer (1968), he notes:
I headed west one bright spring morning with seven dollars and fifty-five cents in my pocket, and during the following year I was in jail in Glenrock, Wyoming, beaten in a fair fight by a one-legged Blackfoot Indian on a reservation in Montana, washed dishes in Reno, Nevada, picked tomatoes outside San Francisco, had the hell scared out of me in a YMCA in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by a man who thought he was Christ, and made friends in Chihuahua, Mexico, with a Mexican airline pilot who made a fetish of motorcycle saddlebags.
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