University Press of Mississippi, 2001

In the late 1970s, when I was first beginning to study seriously the work of Harry Crews, I asked C. Hugh Holman of the University of North Carolina’s English department to write a letter for me as part of a grant application to support my work. While he supported my effort, I learned later that he wondered why I would be interested in working on such a writer as Crews. His attitude toward Crews was perhaps representative of the attitude of the critical establishment of the time, but the appearance of Perspectives on Harry Crews reveals that much has changed in the intervening two decades.