Harry Crews
"Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design."
I'm posting about Harry Crews because of his quote about "well-rounded" people. Those of us in my profession are saddled with educating kids about the myth of the "well-rounded" person, who is, truth be told, boring.
The Writer's Almanac, Monday, June 07, 2004, from Minnesota Public Radio had this piece on Harry Crews:
It's the birthday of novelist Harry Crews, born in Bacon County, Georgia (1935). He's the author of many novels, including The Gypsy's Curse (1977), Body (1990) and Celebration (1997).
He grew up on a series of farms in one of the poorest parts of Georgia. He said the only reason he knew that there was a world outside of rural Georgia was through books. When he was 17 he volunteered for the Marines. He went off to fight in Korea, and it was there that he got his real education, reading whatever books he could get his hands on. He later said, "When I got to my first duty station and walked into the base library, it was like throwing a starving man a turkey. I did my time in the Corps with a book always at hand."
When he got back from Korea, he went to the University of Florida on the G.I. Bill, but he dropped out after two years to drive around the country on his motorcycle. He later said, "Choking and gasping from Truth and Beauty, I gave up on school for a Triumph motorcycle." During his road trip, he worked as a bartender, a cook, and a caller at a carnival sideshow. He also began writing, but it wasn't until 1968 that his first book, The Gospel Singer, was published.
Crews said, "Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design."
And he said, "Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about .... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them."
| Permalink
Posted to Books/Literature | Cultural | Education | Add to 
del.icio.us | Blogmarks |
Furl | ma.gnolia
Comments
That is really profound...
Posted by: jackhammer | June 7, 2004 07:55 AM
Leave it to a southerner. I'm starting to see a pattern. Southern authors say really strange things that are usually true. I wonder why the perspective down there is so different than in the the north.
I especially think it interesting that many of the authors don't buy into the way things are "supposed to be". Reading The Southern Tradition at Bay was my first eye-opener to this and the southerners keep coming.
Maybe my next move will be to the South. I can't wait to finally understand Jason!
Posted by: owen | June 7, 2004 10:00 PM