Harry Crews has primarily written novels -- his thirteenth was published in 1992 -- though he has also authored a highly acclaimed autobiography and many essays. One of the most original and provocative writers of the contemporary South, he creates fictional worlds and describes real ones that have variously fascinated and repulsed his critics but have almost never left them indifferent. Crews's universe is grim and often surreal, filled with physical freaks and emotional misfits, bizarre perversions and obsessions, and extravagant acts of violence. As Allen Shepherd observes, "Reading Crews is not something one wants to do too much of at a single sitting; the intensity of his vision is unsettling."

Crews relates in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978) that he was born and raised in dire poverty in rural south Georgia. His stepfather -- like Harry's father, who died when his son was a small child...