Novelist Harry Crews has passed away. Above, we’ve embedded a YouTube video of the author talking to Dennis Miller about his time in the military, his E.E. Cummings-inspired tattoo and his Scar Lover novel.
He wrote many novels, including The Gospel Singer and A Feast of Snakes, but he also produced an extensive body of nonfiction work. You can explore the novelist’s prolific career at the Henry Crews Bibliography. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Vice Magazine about his work as a writing teacher:
“Well, thank God the University of Florida gave me this deal that every writer needs. I worked with 10 or 12 graduate students a year. They were just young people who thought they wanted to be fiction writers. By and large, they fell in love with the idea of being a fiction writer and then they were introduced to the slave labor of it and they pretty soon decided, “No, I don’t want to do this.” … If you’re going to write a book, you don’t know what you’re looking at. You have to disabuse them of all these ideas they have that they are sure are right but which are almost exclusively, always, all of them, wrong.
Link via Edward Champion; video via Mike Cane)