Harry Crews is a novelist whose finest invention is called Harry Crews, or "I" for short…. His creation, I, travels with sordid carnivals, adores motorbikes and lives on vodka, avoiding tranquillity like a plague of milk. I thrives on danger, I seeks out pain, and Harry Crews translates the feeling into words.

His last book, A Childhood, was sustained and unabashed autobiography. Blood and Grits … continues the portrait of a battered survivor, adding scars to a face already torn, adding feathers to a motley cap….

His writing is an act of laceration. Like so many American thinkers, Harry Crews is uneasy with comfort, appalled by suburbia, exhausted with ease. Blood, like liquor, is thicker than water and Crews is drawn to blood. At moments of violence his prose becomes lyrical. He loves hawks because they don't love him back; he admires good friends who "out of a great...