Body

Even the most outrageous encounters are drawn with love and compassion. It stands with his best works * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
[Crews] has remained for too long a time a hidden literary treasure. Body is all muscle and as impressive as a 300-pound dead lift * People *

Harry Crews was born in 1935 in Alma, Bacon County, Georgia, a rural community near the Okefenokee Swamp. A protégé 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 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), The Gypsy’s Curse (1974), and A Feast of Snakes (1976).

Crews’s reputation as a bold voice in Southern writing grew with his 1978 memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. He died in 2012, leaving a legacy of eighteen novels, including Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit (1971), The Knockout Artist (1988), and Body (1990), numerous nonfiction pieces, and a notable memoir. He is recognized as a prominent figure in the “dirty South” or “grit lit” genre. In 2002, he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

MJ Lenderman, who wrote the foreword, was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose albums include Boat Songs (2022) and Manning Fireworks (2024).

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