Harry Crews on getting naked:
"If you re gonna write, for God in heaven s sake try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you ve been told. . . . If you re gonna write fiction, you have to get right on down to it."

"Harry Crews cannot refrain from storytelling. These conversations are blessed with countless insights into the creative process, fresh takes on old questions, and always, Crews s stories: modern-day parables that tell us how it is to live, to work, and to hurt."--Jeff Baker, Oxford...

This memoir presents an engaging self-portrait of Erskine Caldwell's first thirty years as a writer, with special emphasis on his long and hard apprenticeship before he emerged as one of the most widely read and controversial authors of his time. While conveying the enormous amount of drive and dedication with which he pursued the writer's life, Caldwell tells of his struggles to find his own voice, his travels, and his various jobs, which ranged from back-breaking common labor to much sought-after positions in radio, film, and journalism.

Such literary personages as Nathanael West,...

Critics have called Harry Crews a -mad genius- and -Flannery O'Connor on steroids.- His novels chronicle the southern world on the edge of insanity. His characters set out to eat an entire car on national television, attend rattlesnake round-ups, and become obsessed with training hawks when their suburban lives collapse. Crews has created a bizarre literary landscape, and this book is a critical collection devoted to helping readers traverse it.