I read The Knockout Artist and The Gospel Singer in rapid succession, and what I realized was, yes, I did not know you could write books like these.Ĭrews grapples with race and gender and religion and place, but he stretches them to the breaking point. I found a crumbly paperback copy of A Feast of Snakes in the lounge of the English Department offices at Vanderbilt University when I was an undergraduate there. She told me, “I feel like the thing about Harry Crews is that someone is supposed to give you, like, a used, crumbly paperback copy, and you read it and go: I didn’t know you were allowed to write a book like that.” I mistakenly called it The Knockout Artist, the title of one of Crews’s novels, and she instantly wrote back to ask if I knew of Crews and his work. My friend, the California writer Rufi Thorpe, wrote a brilliant novel called The Knockout Queen, and I emailed her to say how much I loved it. And I remain a fan of Harry Crews because I still don’t know that I’ve read anyone quite like him. And I came away from Harry Crews knowing, on some level, that I wouldn’t ever write like him, could never open the wounds with the kind of ferocity that came only from knowing you’d survive it, because you’d survived much worse.

I wanted to know how you leaned into what it meant to be Southern when you weren’t even sure what that meant, exactly. I read Harry Crews because I wanted to figure out how, if you were a Southern writer, you didn’t simply cover the same terrain that writers like Faulkner and Welty and O’Connor and McCullers had already exhausted. I was initially drawn to Harry Crews because he had a mohawk and a tattoo of a skull, and I was twenty years old and had neither.

A feast of snakes by harry crews