Gospel Singer

Harry Crews (1935-2012) was born during the Great Depression in rural Georgia, USA. He is the author of seventeen novels and a memoir, often revolving around poor and disenfranchised characters from the Deep South. Crews taught creative writing at the University of Florida for nearly thirty years, mentoring and inspiring a generation of writers and gaining the reputation of a literary outsider and outlaw with a singular voice in American fiction. He is today considered a pillar of the Southern Gothic tradition.

“The Gospel Singer was an assertion of Crews’s Southernness, of his claim both to the lofty inheritance of Faulkner and O’Connor and to the clipped, enchorial rhythms of Bacon County.”—Charlie Lee, Harper's“Flannery O’Connor on steroids.” —John Williams, GQ“I don’t know where [Harry Crews’s] narrative magic comes from, but it is firmly there.” —Joseph Heller“…a bona fide Southern writer in the vein of Flannery O’Connor, whose unvarnished language and absurdist take on life among the lower rungs of the region’s social ladder [is] shot through with a rough-and-tumble kind of empathy….it was with great pleasure that I spent last weekend reading The Gospel Singer,… a darkly funny tragedy…. The world he writes about is violent and ruthless….But there’s a point to Crews’ madness, and always present is a throughline of empathy…”—Atlanta Journal Constitution“Critics and awards anoint some authors as legends. Others depend on word-of-mouth and prose that stands the test of time….There is nothing folksy, never mind pastoral or genteel, about Crews. With caustic and fabulist writing, he exhumed the ghosts of America’s original sin…..Crews captured the raw essence of humanity in both fiction and nonfiction. Side by side, these reissues form the complete picture of an imperfect man who charged hard into extremes to escape his cultural inheritance.”—Lauren Leblanc, Los Angeles Times