Probably less than half of the people who had arrived were hunters. Some of them ended up in tents, some bedded down in the backs of pickups, some sat in the open doors of vans, and a great many were in campers of one kind or another… They had come in an unrelenting, noisy stream starting long before daylight. It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning and the actual hunt was still nearly forty-eight hours away, but there were already at least a thousand people camped in and around Mystic. The great event is imminent – it’s the time or the yearly roundup of the rattlesnake hunting… And so many freaks gathered to hunt snakes… And there are so many of those who arrived just to watch and get elated… They are freaks too but of the other kind… He liked blood and bruises, even when they were his own. For whatever reason, though, the idea of studying, of sitting down and deliberately committing facts and relationships to memory was deeply repugnant to him. He had even suspected that he was smarter, too. He was stronger and faster and meaner than other boys his age and for that he had been rewarded. In A Feast of Snakes Harry Crews pushes the dark style of Erskine Caldwell to the ultimate limit.Īll the principal characters of the novel seem to be of the type to whom ignorance is bliss… And the main hero’s existence seems to be reduced to the purely physiological level… Crews published continuously since his first novel, on average of one novel per year. In spring of 1997, Crews retired from UF to devote himself fully to writing. Crews returned to the University of Florida as an English faculty member.

In 1968, Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer, was published. Lauderdale, Florida, where he taught English at Broward Community College. Later, after graduating from the master's program, Crews was denied entrance to the graduate program for Creative Writing. He returned to the University of Florida in 1958.

After two years of school, Crews set out on an extended road trip. His eldest son drowned in 1964.Ĭrews served in the Korean War and, following the war, enrolled at the University of Florida under the G.I. Crews is twice divorced and is the father of two sons. His mother later moved her sons to Jacksonville, Florida. His father died when he was an infant and his mother quickly remarried. Harry Eugene Crews was born during the Great Depression to sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia.

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