The First Biography of Harry Crews
In 2010, Ted Geltner drove to Gainesville, Florida, to pay a visit to Harry Crews and ask the legendary author if he would be willing to be the subject of a literary biography. His health rapidly deteriorating, Crews told Geltner he was on board and would even sit for interviews and tell his stories one last time. “Ask me anything you want, bud,” Crews said. “But you’d better do it quick.” The result is Blood, Bone, and Marrow, the first full-length biography about one of the most unlikely figures in 20th Century American literature, a writer who emerged from a dirt-poor South Georgia tenant farm and went on to create a singularly unique voice of fiction.

In Blood, Bone and Marrow, Ted Geltner is the first to tell the Crews story as a full-length biography. Geltner got to know Crews while working as a journalist and interviewed the legendary writer many times in the years leading up to his death in 2012. He had conducted more than 100 interviews with family, friends, colleagues and contemporaries who offered insight into the life of his subject. In addition, Geltner spent hundreds of hours in the vast Crews archives, which includes correspondence, notes, screenplays, unpublished writing and other materials from a fifty-plus year career. The result is the story of a life ultimately saved by writing, and one that left the world with a unique and magnificent body of work.

2017 Georgia Author of the Year Award Winner
