Harry Eugene Crews was born near Alma, Georgia, on June 6, 1935. His parents were tenant farmers barely making a living. When Crews was less than two years old his father passed away from a heart attack. Following this, his mother married his father’s brother, who was a violent alcoholic.

At the age of five, Crews was struck with leg cramps so severe that his heels drew up to the backs of his thighs. As a result, he was bedridden for more than six weeks. Finally, when he could go outside, he had to be carried around the farm. He gradually began to walk again by pulling himself along a fence. Just a year later, Crews was accidentally thrown into a scalding cast-iron boiler that left burns covering more than two-thirds of his body. He miraculously survived because his head stayed above the water. Despite the hardships he faced growing up, Crews remained resilient.

Crews joined the Marines at seventeen-years-old. During his time in the service, he read regularly and seriously. When his military obligation ended, he enrolled at the University of Florida (UF) on the G.I. Bill with the intention of becoming a writer. Crews’ undergraduate writing teacher at UF, Andrew Lytle, once taught Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey. At UF he also met his wife, Sally Ellis, whom he married in 1960. Together they had two sons, but the marriage did not last and they divorced in 1961. However, just two years later they remarried.

Crews began teaching in 1962, and after years of rejection, his first novel, The Gospel Singer, was published in 1968 and garnered good reviews. Its publication earned Crews a new teaching job at the University of Florida. It also paved the way for the publication of seven more novels over the next eight years, including Naked in Garden Hills (1969); Car (1972); The Hawk Is Dying (1973), which was adapted into a film released in 2006; The Gypsy’s Curse (1974); and the widely acclaimed A Feast of Snakes (1976).

Crews’ reputation was growing as a bold and daring new voice in Southern writing. The well-known writer Norman Mailer said, “Crews has a talent all his own. He begins where James Dickey left off.” Crews’ writing is rooted in the Southern Gothic tradition. Most of his books are set in modern-day Florida or Georgia, often edgy in their exploration of such extremities as blood sports, the limits of sanity, and bizarre compulsions and obsessions. Crews, like Flannery O’Connor, has an affinity for the grotesque in his characters.

After his 1976 novel was published, it would be a decade before his next book release. During this time, his lifestyle increasingly became a source of interest to critics and readers alike. He was frank in interviews about his drinking and drug use, and often changed his appearance by wearing a Mohawk, shaving his head, or getting tattoos. One tattoo features a skull with the text: “How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?” (a quote from an untitled poem by E. E. Cummings).

During these years Crews continued to teach. He became a regular contributor to Esquire, Playboy, Sport, and other magazines. A column he wrote for Esquire called “Grits” laid the groundwork for what many critics consider his best book, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978). In A Childhood, Crews’ style is honest and unflinching as he describes the violence and desperation surrounding him as a young boy, yet he is nonjudgmental, showing respect for people despite their flaws. In 1982, a collection of his work Florida Frenzy was published and contained his screenplays, plays, and nonfiction pieces. In 1997, he retired from his teaching career but continued to write. Crews was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2001.