In his fiction and in his life, Harry Crews empathized most with the people who needed it most: the freaks, the fuck-ups, people who’d been broken by loss of one kind or another. Crews died yesterday, at age 76. As his son Byron told The Daily’s Claire Howorth, “[he] put more miles on the Chevy than most of us.”
Amended to say: Now that I’ve pulled myself together, I wrote about him for The Awl. And of course, there are the archives.
Image courtesy of the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library; you can also find a podcast of Crews teaching a creative writing seminar.