In five pages this paper discusses the rural poverty featured in the writings of Harry Crew and the unsanitized and totally uncompromising views of it the author provides in his works. Three sources are cited in the bibliography.
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of the most interesting contemporary writers. His work is captivating and many times shocking. His goal is to provide an unglamorized, unsanitized view of the subject he knows
best, life in rural poverty. Perhaps one of the best insights into the question of why Harry Crews writes as he does can be found in a collection of
interviews with him which occurred between 1972 and 1997, interviews published in Erik Bledsoes "Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews Harry Crews". In Crews words:
"If youre gonna write, for God in heavens sake try to get naked...Try to write the truth. Try
to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that youve been told" (Bledsoe, 1999).
Crews work does bare all. He writes with a vibrancy and sense of reality that is seldom found in other writers. The result, as would
be expected, is very different from the view of the world which we have become accustomed to being spoon fed. Crews is not an observer, he is a participant.
In "Life of a Georgia Innocent" he provides an insiders look of what it was like to live in an extreme state of poverty in a dysfunctional family in
the deep south. In this article, originally published in July 1976 in Crews monthly column in "Esquire", Crews summarizes his experiences growing up in a tenant farm family in
Bacon County, Georgia with a brutal alcoholic stepfather who, ironically was also his paternal uncle. After the death of Crews biological father when he was not yet two years