Mr. Crews, already known as a novelist of flamboyantly Gothic imagination, began to appear in Playboy and had a column in Esquire, where he wrote pieces that were Southern in tone but not always in subject: on the L. L. Bean store in Maine, the Texas tower and the Shenandoah national park, among others.

I read most of his stuff when it first came out, and I thought it was wonderful. Mr. Crews got away from the formula writing of most magazine pieces and managed to turn every assignment into a picaresque adventure….

Reading him, I thought, was sheer delight, even if every article did turn out to be a fragment of his autobiography. On reading him over between hard covers [in "Blood and Grits,"] however, my enthusiasm dimmed. Editors do writers a disservice by reprinting material that was meant to be perishable. Magazines, with their colorful layouts...