NY Daily News: Author Harry Crews, a hell-raiser and cult favorite whose hard and crazy times inspired his brutal tales of the rural South, died Wednesday in Gainesville, Fla. He was 76 and had suffered from neuropathy, said his ex-wife, Sally Ellis Crews.
“He had been very ill,” she told The Associated Press on Thursday. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.” Thanks in part to motorcycle accidents and nerve damage in his feet, he had walked with a cane in recent years. But his career remained active. An excerpt from a forthcoming memoir had been published in the Georgia Review and there was talk of reissuing his books, many of them out of print, in digital editions.
He wasn’t widely known, but those who knew him— whether personally or through his books — became devoted. A wild man and truth teller in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson, he wrote bloodied stories drawn directly from his own experiences, including boxing and karate. Crews sported a tattoo with a line from an E.E. Cummings poem, “How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,” on his right bicep under the tattoo of a skull.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
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