The Knockout Artist

A good old-fashioned morality play with drama and style to spare… * Chicago Tribune *
Crews, one of the most inventive practitioners in modern American letters, returns to a milieu that has long fascinated him: the seedy world of fighters and musclemen … A brilliant specialist in black humour, Crews delivers the goods once again. His deadpan prose style is uncannily effective in meshing the surreal and everyday life. While the characters are mainly freaks, they come across so directly, often with an affecting sweetness, that they acquire extraordinary vibrancy. Crews is a modernist all right, but he isn’t a facile one. The moral here and elsewhere in his work is old-fashioned: to thine own self be true. * Publishers Weekly *
Crews stalks the ring in near peak form, a master of storytelling fundamentals - pacing, character motivation, atmospheric details - yet armed with surprise punches. Don’t expect just a ring-side seat … You don’t merely read Harry Crews. You climb into the ring with him and go fifteen rounds … Score one for Harry Crews. * Winston-Salem Journal *
Characterization, incidents and tone are all beautifully sustained in this unusual book. * Library Journal *

Harry Crews was born in 1935 in Alma, Bacon County, Georgia, a rural community near the Okefenokee Swamp. A protege of Southern novelist Andrew Lytle, Crews published his first short story in the Sewanee Review in 1962. His first novel, The Gospel Singer, was published in 1968, leading to a teaching position at the University of Florida and the publication of seven more novels over the next eight years, including Naked in Garden Hills (1969), Car (1972), The Hawk Is Dying (1973) (adapted into a film in 2006), The Gypsy’s Curse (1974), and the acclaimed A Feast of Snakes (1976).

Crews’s reputation as a bold voice in Southern writing grew throughout the 1970s, during which he contributed to popular magazines like Esquire and Playboy, and wrote screenplays. In 1978, his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place was published to enduring acclaim. Two compilations of his nonfiction, Blood and Grits and Florida Frenzy, were released in 1979 and 1982, respectively.

Following a decade marked by drug and alcohol abuse and creative challenges, Crews published his ninth novel, All We Need of Hell, in 1987. He retired from teaching at the University of Florida in Gainesville after thirty years. Crews, who died in 2012 at age seventy-six, is recognized as a prominent figure in the “Dirty South” or “Grit Lit” literary genre.

He reshaped Southern gothic with his eighteen novels, including Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit (1971), The Knockout Artist (1988), and Body (1990), along with numerous nonfiction works and a notable memoir. In 2002, the University of Georgia Libraries inducted Harry Crews into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

S.A. Cosby (foreword) is the author of the New York Times bestseller Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book, and received accolades from NPR, The Guardian, and Library Journal. His latest novel is All The Sinners Bleed.

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