Crews, Harry 1935–

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Crews, Harry 1935–

(Harry Eugene Crews)

PERSONAL: Born June 6, 1935, in Alma, GA; son of Rey (a farmer) and Myrtice (Haselden) Crews; married Sally Thornton Ellis, January 24, 1960 (divorced); children: Patrick Scott (deceased), Byron Jason. Education: University of Florida, B.A., 1960, M.S.Ed., 1962.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Writer. Broward Junior College, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, teacher of English, 1962–68; University of Florida, Gainesville, associate professor, 1968–74, professor of English, 1974–88. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1953–56; became sergeant.

AWARDS, HONORS: Award from American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1972.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Gospel Singer, Morrow (New York, NY), 1968, reprinted, Perennial Library (New York, NY), 1988.

Naked in Garden Hills, Morrow (New York, NY), 1969.

This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven, Morrow (New York, NY), 1970.

Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, Morrow (New York, NY), 1971.

Car, Morrow (New York, NY), 1972.

The Hawk Is Dying, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1973.

The Gypsy's Curse, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1974.

A Feast of Snakes, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1976.

All We Need of Hell, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1987.

The Knockout Artist, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1988.

Body, Poseidon Press (New York, NY), 1990.

Scar Lover, Poseidon Press (New York, NY), 1992.

The Mulching of America, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1995.

Celebration, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

SHORT STORIES

The Enthusiast, Palaemon Press, 1981.

Two, Lord John (Northridge, CA), 1984.

Contributor of stories to Florida Quarterly and Craft and Vision.

OTHER

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (autobiography), Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1978, reprinted, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1995.

Blood and Grits (nonfiction), Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1979.

Florida Frenzy (essays and stories), University Presses of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 1982.

Blood Issue (play), produced in Louisville, KY, 1989.

Madonna at Ringside, Lord John (Northridge, CA), 1991.

Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader, Poseidon Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews, edited by Erik Bledsoe, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 1999.

Author of column "Grits" for Esquire. Contributor to Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, and Playboy.

SIDELIGHTS: Reading novelist Harry Crews, Allen Shepherd maintained in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "is not something one wants to do too much of at a single sitting; the intensity of his vision is unsettling." This vision is both comic and tragic, nostalgic and grotesque, and is focused on the American South where Crews was raised and still lives. His characters, often physically deformed or strangely obsessed, are grotesques in the Southern gothic tradition, and his stories are violent and extreme. Michael Mewshaw, writing in the Nation, explained that Crews "has taken a cast of the misfit and malformed—freaks, side-show performers, psychopaths, cripples, midgets and catatonics—and yoked it to plots which are even more improbable than his characters." Frank W. Shelton of the Southern Literary Journal defined the world of Crews's fiction as "mysterious, violent and dangerous" and called his vision "a lonely and extremely sad one." But Mewshaw did not find Crews's vision essentially sad. He found that Crews is "beset by existential nausea but, like any normal American, is not blind to the humor of it all. Bleak, mordant, appalling, Harry Crews can also be hilarious." Vivian Mercier of the World echoed this idea, remarking that "reading Crews is a bit like undergoing major surgery with laughing gas."

Crews first began to create stories as a boy in rural Georgia during the Depression. Living in an area where, he claims in his A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, "there wasn't enough cash money … to close up a dead man's eyes," Crews and his friends found a wonderland in the Sears, Roebuck mail order catalog. The boys called the catalog their dream book because the models seemed unnaturally perfect to them, and the merchandise was far beyond their reach. While poring over the catalog pictures, Crews entertained his friends by spinning stories about the models and products. "I had decided that all the people in the catalog were related," he explains in A Childhood, "not necessarily blood kin but knew one another…. And it was out of this knowledge that I first began to make up stories."

After serving four years in the U.S. Marines, which he joined at the age of seventeen, Crews went to the University of Florida where he was inspired by writer-in-residence Andrew Lyle to begin writing seriously. In his first published novel, The Gospel Singer, Crews writes of his native Georgia. A popular traveling evangelist, the Gospel Singer appears in his hometown of Enigma during a concert tour. His local sweetheart has recently been murdered and, it is suspected, raped by a black man. The Singer is trailed into town by the Freak Fair, a sideshow of human oddities—including the show's owner, a man with an oversized foot—working the crowds attracted by the Singer's revival meetings. When the accused murderer is threatened with lynching, the Gospel Singer tries to save him by revealing that the murdered woman was not in fact a violated virgin but "the biggest whore who ever walked in Enigma," as Shepherd wrote. The result is chaos.

Response to The Gospel Singer was generally favorable. Though Walter Sullivan in Sewanee Review found the book has "all the hallmarks of a first novel: it is energetic but uneven, competent but clumsy, not finally satisfactory but memorable nonetheless," and believed that "Crews has a good eye, an excellent ear for voices, and a fine dramatic sense." Martin Levin, writing in the New York Times Book Review, commented that The Gospel Singer "has a nice wild flavor and a dash of Grand Guignol strong enough to meet the severe standards of Southern decadence." And Guy Davenport in National Review called the novel "a frenetic sideshow of Georgia poor white trash and their Hochkultur."

Crews followed The Gospel Singer with Naked in Garden Hills, a book Jean Stafford of the New York Times Book Review believed "lives up to and beyond the shining promise of … The Gospel Singer. The novel is southern Gothic at its best, a Hieronymus Bosch landscape in Dixie inhabited by monstrous, darling pets." Naked in Garden Hills revolves around the almost helpless Mayhugh Aaron, known as the Fat Man because of his six-hundred-pound frame, and his valet John Henry Williams, a tiny black man who takes care of him. Fat Man owns most of Garden Hills, a town where the local phosphate mine is the only source of employment. When the mine is exhausted and closed, the town faces financial collapse. To avoid ruin, Dolly Ferguson opens a nightclub with go-go dancers and a sideshow to attract the tourist trade. She wants Fat Man as her star sideshow exhibit, but he refuses. As his employees, including Williams the valet, are one by one hired away by Dolly, and as his financial situation deteriorates, the Fat Man is reduced to a humiliated and helpless figure. He is finally forced to join the sideshow. "Bleeding, beaten by the mob of tourists, naked, and drooling, he crawls to his waiting cage and is lifted high in the light," Shepherd recounted.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Yardley found Naked in Garden Hills "a convincing grotesque of a rotting American landscape and its decadent inhabitants," and Shelton wrote that the novel "treats religion in an almost allegorical way." He cited the book's title as a reference to the Garden of Eden, saw Jack O'Boylan, the out-of-state mine owner, as a God figure, and pictured Dolly Ferguson as a kind of savior meant to restore the town. But the novel's ending shows that "man's desire to find meaning in his life leads to degradation, exploitation and the denial of love," Shelton wrote.

A religious dimension can be found in Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, in which Crews writes of an outlaw karate class that meets on a Florida beach and is barred from tournament competition because of its deadly reputation. John Kaimon wanders into this circle and becomes a member, undergoing the rigorous training under the hot sun. The star member of the class, brown belt Gaye Nell Odell, becomes pregnant, possibly by Kaimon. Shelton found both Kaimon and Odell searching for something—something they both find in the discipline of karate. The training, Shelton argued, "is an almost religious ritual through which people attempt to link and fulfill body and spirit." John Deck observed in the New York Times Book Review that, after a slow start, Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit "takes off, in the manner of a fire storm, rushing at amazing speed, eating up the oxygen, scorching everything it touches."

In Car, Crews examines another physical discipline, this one far less common than karate. Herman Mack, whose family is in the automobile junkyard business, decides it is his destiny to eat an automobile, four ounces at a time each day. His daily ingestion of the cut-up auto is broadcast on national television as a sports event. At first pleased with his instant notoriety, Herman falls in love with a prostitute and ends by abandoning his spectacle before it is finished. Yardley found Crews' ending to be "mere sentimentality" and a "flabby resolution," but nonetheless called the novel "a marvelous idea" and "exceedingly funny, indeed painfully so." A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement viewed the novel as "a satire on two alleged vices of the American people: an extravagant fondness for motor-cars, and a taste for ghoulish spectacle." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times also saw larger implications in the story, concluding that Car "may very well be the best metaphor yet made up about America's passionate love affair with the automobile."

Another strange case of personal destiny dominates The Hawk Is Dying. George Gattling becomes obsessed with training a wild hawk, an obsession that estranges him from his family and friends. His efforts eventually reach fruition when "the hawk has finally been 'manned,' and flies free to kill and return again to Gattling's hand," resulting in "one moment of absolute value—and hence absolute beauty," as a critic for the Times Literary Supplement explained, adding that the story is told in "comic-horrific scenes." Mercier also found this odd mix in the novel, writing that "beauty and pity and terror coexist with satire and grotesque humor." Similarly, Phoebe Adams in an Atlantic review called The Hawk Is Dying "a bizarre mixture of tragedy and farce." But she went on to say that, though "the events of this novel are hardly realistic,… the book becomes immensely convincing because the underlying pattern of desperation over wasted time and neglected abilities is real and recognizable."

Crews examines a town's obsession with rattlesnakes in A Feast of Snakes. He fictionalizes a unique yearly custom in Mystic, Georgia, where the townspeople hold a Rattlesnake Roundup at which they crown a rattlesnake queen, hold a snake fight, and even dine on rattlesnake. The novel follows local resident Joe Lon Mackey, who is unhappily married, illiterate, and bitter about his life. Crews shows the pressures that drive Mackey to go on a murderous rampage at the snake roundup. The gruesome events leading up to this final outburst of violence are seen by many critics to be expertly handled. "Crews," Paul D. Zimmerman wrote in Newsweek, "has an ugly knack for making the most sordid sequences amusing, for evoking an absolutely venomous atmosphere, unredeemed by charity or hope. Few writers could pull off the sort of finale that has mad-eyed rednecks rushing in sudden bursts across a snake-scattered, bonfire-bright field, their loins enflamed by the local beauty contestants, their blood racing with whisky, their hearts ready for violence. Crews does." A critic for the New Yorker called Crews "a writer of extraordinary power. Joe Lon is a monster, but we are forced to accept him as human, and even as sympathetic. Mr. Crews' story makes us gag, but he holds us, in awe and admiration, to the sickening end."

Crews's nonfiction book A Childhood sheds some insight onto the sources of his fiction in its description of the first six years of the author's life. Childhood was a period, Crews claims, when "what has been most significant in my life had all taken place." His father died when he was two years old. His mother then married his uncle, a man she later left because of his violent rages. Crews had a bout with polio, which paralyzed his legs for a time and forced him to hobble. A fall into a tub of scalding water, used for removing the skin off slaughtered hogs, removed the first layer of skin on most of Crews's body. "The skin on the top of the wrist and the back of my hand, along with the fingernails," he remembers in the book, "all just turned loose and slid on down to the ground." Despite the hardships of his childhood, Crews presents the people of his home county in a warm, honest, and unapologetic manner. As the writer recounts, "It was a world in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives." Robert Sherrill of the New York Times Book Review admitted: "It's easy to despise poor folks. A Childhood makes it more difficult. It raises almost to a level of heroism these people who seem of a different century."

Critical reaction to A Childhood was generally positive, with several critics citing Crews's restraint in recounting his life. Mewshaw, for example, found that throughout the book, Crews "maintains a precarious balance between sentiment and sensation, memory and madness, and manages to convince the reader of two mutually exclusive imperatives which have shaped his life—the desire to escape Bacon County and the constant ineluctable need to go back, if only in memory." A New Yorker critic wrote that Crews remembers his childhood with "a sense of grateful escape and shattering loss which have the confusing certainty of truth."

The author resumed writing longer works of fiction in late 1980s, producing the novels All We Need of Hell and The Knockout Artist. Like his books from previous decades, the works have been acclaimed for their gritty Southern flavor and offbeat characters. All We Need of Hell concerns Duffy Deeter, a driven attorney who constantly seeks to prove his manliness. When his wife throws him out of the house, Duffy commences a spree of exercise and drinking, a session that ends when a former enemy teaches Duffy the virtues of love, friendship, and forgiveness.

"If All We Need of Hell ran according to Harry Crews's earlier fictional form," remarked Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, "Duffy's misadventures would lead him to some bizarre or even ghoulish fate." Noting, though, that "something new has been added" to Crews's fiction, Lehmann-Haupt lamented that "there is something decidedly forced and even sentimental about [the story's positive] turn of events…. We come away from the novel regarding it as a distinctly lesser effort." Beaufort Cranford, writing in the Detroit News was similarly disappointed, commenting that "we readers of Crews suddenly find ourselves on alarmingly cheerful ground…. [The ending to] All We Need of Hell is a … shock, much like a sudden infusion of sugar." Despite complaints that Crews had softened his fiction, Lehmann-Haupt concluded that "we can't help forgiving him for it. There's still such a vividness to his characters. There's still such ease to his prose…. [And] he still has the power to make us smile and even laugh out loud."

Body centers around a backwoods Georgia girl named Dorothy Turnipseed who takes to working out in a gym and eventually goes on to compete, under the name Shereel Dupont, in the Ms. Cosmos competition. "In the world of the Ms. Cosmos competition, sex is for losing weight, food is for fuel, other people for rivalry, love for exploitation, family for leaving," novelist Fay Weldon noted in her New York Times Book Review assessment of the book. Nevertheless, Dorothy/Shereel's family accompanies her all the way to the contest where they are conspicuous among the bodybuilders because of their immense bulk. Merle Rubin was unforgiving in her criticism of the book in the Wall Street Journal, labeling it a "violent comic-strip of a novel" that "mixes clenched, muscle-bound humor with lashings of fairly standard-style pornography." Weldon, however, was extremely enthusiastic, describing it as "electric … a hard, fast and brilliant book." She had special praise for Crews's ability to create convincing women: "Not for a moment, such is this male writer's skill, the throttled-back energy of his writing, do I doubt Mr. Crews's right to be as intimate as he is with his female characters…. Shereel's struggle between love and honor provides the book's tender, perfect fleshing out; the will-she-win, won't-she-win tension, mounting page by page, gives muscle, nerve and fervor to the whole." She added, however, that "it's Harry Crews's ability to describe physical existence, bodily sensation, that most impresses."

In Scar Lover, Crews featured a typical cast of outcasts and misfits, including a pair of scarred Rastafarian lovers and a woman who sings lullabies to her husband's skull. The protagonist is Peter Butcher, a man tormented by guilt because of an accident in which he left his younger brother permanently brain-damaged. Filled with self-loathing and reviled by the rest of his family, Peter eventually drifts into true love, fighting it all the way. "It may surprise the followers of Harry Crews to hear that his twelfth novel is a love story that is both life-affirming and tender," noted Robert Phillips in the Hudson Review. It is "a comic morality play which is less fierce and more tender than any of his previous works." In the reviewer's estimation, however, the positive messages in Scar Lover in no way blunt the power of the author's work. Chicago Tribune writer Gary Dretzka felt that the novel "is successful in promoting the healing powers of love and forgiveness" and that "Crews' familiar tenderness toward his outcast characters is here in spades, driven by typically muscular writing and energetic pacing."

A darker tone permeated The Mulching of America, a book described by a Washington Post Book World reviewer as "a satire of corporate America and the credo of success at any cost." The reviewer went on to say that "Crews's wicked satire sends up corporate culture's celebration of conformity and boundless personal sacrifice." The central characters are Hickum Looney, a door-to-door salesman for a soap company; Gaye Nell Odell, a homeless prostitute (seen previously in Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit); and the Boss—the harelipped, hard-driving chief of the Soap for Life Company. Valerie Sayers, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, found the characters predictable enough "for reader discomfort to set in." Still, she added that especially in the case of Hickum and Gaye Nell, "that their love story is sweetly compelling is the measure of Mr. Crews's ability to have his cartoon characters remind us, vaguely and laughably, of our own most compelling fears and humiliations." Sayers further credited the author with creating a successful portrayal of "Americans terrified of taking a step or making a moral choice," and concluded that "Crews is a storyteller who bears down on American enterprise with fierce eyes and a cackle. By the end of the story, he's not laughing and we are all ready to look away."

Some observers have judged Crews's stories to be excessive; "His harshest critics claim that Crews always pushes things too far—to the point where his characters turn into caricatures and his plots become cartoons," Mewshaw commented. One such critic was Sarah Blackburn, who in the New York Times Book Review described The Hawk Is Dying as "a festival of mangled animals, tortured sexuality and innocence betrayed." James Atlas in Time called Crews "a Southern gothic novelist who often makes William Faulkner look pastoral by comparison"; Crews's novel A Feast of Snakes was even banned in South Africa. However, Admirers of the writer continue to cite his ability to transform unusual or extreme subjects into credible, moving stories. Doris Grumbach, writing in the Saturday Review, admitted that Crews's novels possess a "bizarre, mad, violent, and tragic quality," but maintained that the writer "has a sympathy for maimed and deformed characters, a love of strange situations, and the talent to make it all, somehow, entirely believable." Shepherd, writing of Car, The Hawk Is Dying, and A Feast of Snakes in Critique, added that Crews displays "in these strangely powerful, outlandish, excessive, grotesquely alive novels a gift at once formidable and frightening."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 6, 1976, Volume 23, 1983, Volume 49, 1988.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 6: American Novelists since World War II, Second Series, 1980, Volume 143; Third Series, 1994.

Jeffrey, David K., editor, A Grit's Triumph: Essays on the Works of Harry Crews, Associated Faculty Press (Port Washington, NY), 1983.

PERIODICALS

Arkansas Review, spring, 1995, pp. 1, 82-94.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 18, 1987, p. J8; June 26, 1988, p. J8; April 9, 1989, pp. N1, N2; September 2, 1990, p. N14; January 26, 1992, p. N8; March 8, 1992, p. N1; November 28, 1993, p. K8.

Atlantic, April, 1973, Phoebe Adams, review of The Hawk Is Dying.

Booklist, February 15, 1992, Eloise Kinney, review of Scar Lover, p. 1086; October 1, 1993, Martha Schoolman, review of Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader, p. 244; January 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Celebration, p. 774.

Boston Globe, January 13, 1987, p. 59; May 3, 1988, p. 73; October 1, 1990, p. 32; February 21, 1992, p. 40; November 23, 1995, p. A26.

Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1987, sec. 14, p. 3; April 10, 1988, sec. 14, p. 6; August 27, 1990, sec. 5, p. 3; February 23, 1992, p. 6.

Chicago Tribune Book World, October 29, 1978; March 11, 1979; July 18, 1982; July 31, 1983; February 23, 1992, sec. 14, p. 6.

Critique, September, 1978; fall, 1986, pp. 45-53.

Detroit News, February 1, 1987, Beaufort Cranford, review of All We Need of Hell, p. H2.

Entertainment Weekly, February 28, 1992, Margot Mifflin, review of Scar Lover, p. 50; March 27, 1992, review of Body, p. 69; November 17, 1995, Michael Glitz, review of The Mulching of America, p. 75.

Georgia Review, fall 1987, pp. 627-631; fall 1994, pp. 537-553.

Harper's, August, 1986, p. 35.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1993, Robert Phillips, review of Scar Lover, pp. 492-493.

Journal of American Culture, fall, 1988, pp. 47-54.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1997.

Library Journal, August, 1990, Robert H. Donahugh, review of Body, p. 139; February 1, 1992, Brack Stoval, review of Scar Lover, p. 121; November 15, 1995, Henry J. Carrigan, Jr., review of The Mulching of America, p. 98; December 1997, Wilda Williams, review of Celebration, p. 148.

Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1987, p. B8; May 22, 1988, p. B6; January 31, 1992, p. E2.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 3, 1987; May 22, 1988, p. 6; September 23, 1990, p. 3; October 21, 1990, p. 3; January 14, 1996, p. 2.

Maclean's, March 26, 1979.

Mississippi Quarterly, winter, 1987–88, pp. 1, 69-88.

Nation, February 3, 1979.

National Review, April 21, 1970, Guy Davenport, review of The Gospel Singer.

New Boston Review, February-March, 1979.

New Republic, March 31, 1973; May 8, 1989, Robert Brustein, theater review of Blood Issue, p. 28.

Newsweek, August 2, Paul D. Zimmerman, review of A Feast of Snakes, 1976.

New Yorker, July 15, 1974; July 26, 1976; November 6, 1978.

New York Times, March 2, 1972; March 21, 1973; April 30, 1974; July 12, 1976; December 11, 1978; February 6, 1979; January 12, 1987, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of All We Need of Hell, p. C19; February 1, 1987, p. 9; February 19, 1987, Herbert Mitgang, "The 'Screwy' World of a Southern Writer,"; April 18, 1988, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Knockout Artist, p. C21; May 1, 1988, p. 21; April 5, 1989, Mel Gussow, "Actors Theater," p. C19; November 20, 1995, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Mulching of America, p. C16; January 8, 1998, Christopher Le-hmann-Haupt, review of Celebration, p. B12.

New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1968; April 13, 1969; April 26, 1970; April 25, 1971; February 27, 1972; March 25, 1973; March 10, 1974; June 2, 1974; June 23, 1974; September 12, 1976; December 24, 1978; March 25, 1979; February 1, 1987, Russell Banks, review of All We Need of Hell, pp. 9, 11; May 1, 1988, Charles Nicol, review of The Knockout Artist, p. 21; September 9, 1990, Fay Weldon, review of Body, p. 14; March 15, 1992, p. 13; November 5, 1995, Valerie Sayers, review of The Mulching of America, p. 18.

Observer (London, England), October 30, 1994, p. 4.

People, June 8, 1987, Michelle Green, "Life-scarred and Weary of Battle, a Literary Guerrilla Calls Truce," p. 75; October 1, 1990, Lorenzo Carcaterra, review of Body, p. 41.

Playboy, August, 1990, p. 64.

Prairie Schooner, spring, 1974.

Publishers Weekly, April 15, 1988, Bob Summer, interview with Crews, p. 64; June 29, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, review of Body, p. 86; December 13, 1991, review of Scar Lover, p. 44; September 11, 1995, review of The Mulching of America, p. 76; Novemer 17, 1997, review of Celebration, p. 54.

Saturday Review, November 11, 1978.

Sewanee Review, winter, 1969, Walter Sullivan, review of The Gospel Singer.

Shenandoah, summer, 1974.

Southern Literary Journal, spring, 1980; spring, 1984, pp. 132-135; spring, 1992, pp. 2, 3-10.

Spectator, January 22, 1977.

Studies in the Literary Imagination, fall, 1994, Robert C. Covel, "The Violent Bear It as Best They Can: Cultural Conflict in the Novels of Harry Crews," pp. 2, 75-86.

Texas Review, spring-summer, 1988, pp. 1-2, 96-109.

Time, September 13, 1976; October 23, 1978; March 5, 1979; April 17, 1989, review of Blood Issue, p. 70; March 2, 1992, Adam Begley, review of Scar Lover, p. 66.

Times Literary Supplement, February 2, 1973; January 11, 1974; January 24, 1975; January 21, 1977; December 7, 1979; December 30, 1994, p. 19.

Village Voice, October 30, 1978.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1980, pp. 612-626.

Wall Street Journal, August 31, 1990, Merle Rubin, review of Body, p. A9.

Washington Post, March 29, 1979.

Washington Post Book World, April 15, 1973; July 24, 1983; May 1, 1988; August 19, 1990, p. 3; February 16, 1992, p. 4; October 17, 1993, p. 3; February 4, 1996, p. 8.

World, April 24, 1973.

Writers Digest, June, 1982, Jerry C. Hunter, interview with Crews, p. 30.