Blood, Bone and Marrow

A Biography of Harry Crews

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.

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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Geltner spent hundreds of hours in the vast Crews archives, which includes correspondence, notes, screenplays, unpublished writing and other materials from a fifty-plus year career.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.

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2017 Georgia Author of the Year Award Winner

“Harry Crews was a uniquely gifted and haunted storyteller. Novelist, journalist, memoirist—he made each form his own in a way no one else had before or since. The pages that follow in this absorbing biography detail this and reach into the guts of the experiences that formed him and gave him a voice that was sad, brutal, and funny. Harry said that when it came to writing the truth about himself—or anything for that matter—he was not as interested in facts as he was in memory and belief.”  — Bestselling author Michael Connelly
“Geltner brilliantly renders the life of the late writer Harry Crews  in this well-researched and vivid biography. It captures the wild spirit of an unflinching American writer from his early years in impoverished Bacon County, Ga. , to his years as an esteemed but volatile faculty member in the University of Florida’s creative writing program. In just two decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, Crews went from working as a junior college composition teacher to being a friend of Madonna and featured writer for Playboy. Geltner traces much of the inner pain in Crews’s life back to his tense relationship with his brother, Hoyett; the suspicion that his father was not his biological parent; and the shocking death by drowning of his young son.”  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Geltner draws on interviews with Crews, his colleagues, students, drinking buddies, and ex-wife and on Crews’ fiction, memoirs, and nonfiction to produce a candid, sympathetic life of a wounded, self-destructive man. Born in rural Georgia to a family struck hard by the Great Depression, Crews’ childhood was 'filled with violence and pain and hideously damaged people' and 'replete with disease and alienation and indescribable suffering.'”  —Kirkus Reviews 
“Now we have Mr. Geltner’s biography to authoritatively fill in the gaps, and to trace the many stories behind the Crews legend...a lean and pleasingly consumable book by sticking to essentials. He’s delivered what Vladimir Nabokov said a biographer should: 'plain facts, no symbol-searching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions, no Marxist bunkum, no Freudian rot.'”  —The New York Times
“Geltner maintains a warm relationship with his subject, allowing Crews’ irreverent, raunchy, no-holds-barred personality to swagger forth in delightfully uncensored remarks and observations, many of them unprintable. We see the faces of the demons that compelled him through Geltner’s careful anatomy of their origins: the poisonous beginnings, the death of Crews’ first son by drowning, and the lifelong, 'relentless feelings of inferiority' that no success could check.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Harry Crews was a brilliant, maddening, hell-roaring personality who also happened to be a great writer. Blood, Bone and Marrow will stand as the definitive Crews biography. His true life was bigger and wilder than even his own novels. Harry was one of my all-time favorites." —Bestselling author Carl Hiaasen

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