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Contents: |
The collection consists of the literary papers of American writer Harry Crews. These papers document his writing career up
through the publication of his twentieth book, An American Family: The Child With the Curious Marking (2006). Typed and holograph
manuscripts, correspondence, clippings, conference material, awards, literary and film contracts, financial statements, and
photographs make up the bulk of materials, which generally date from the mid-1960s onward.
Correspondence includes Crews' mentor Andrew Lytle (who first published Crews in The Sewanee Review), letters from college
friends/apprentice writers, and rejection slips and correspondences from prospective literary agents and publishers. Letters
from the period when Crews published his first two novels -- The Gospel Singer, Naked in Garden Hills - include correspondence
with his first literary agent, Bert Cochran, of American Authors, Inc., with John Hawkins of Paul Reynolds, Inc., who succeeded
Cochran, and with Crews' editor at William Morrow, Jim Landis. Correspondence appears from other American writers - John Ciardi,
Seymour Epstein, Maxine Kumin, William Meredith, Henry Van Dyke and others -- with whom Crews became acquainted through the
Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the University of Florida Writers Conference, the latter which he co-directed between 1970-1974
with fellow UF writer and professor Smith Kirkpatrick. Other writers represented include Malcolm Braly, Robert Olen Butler,
Erskine Caldwell, Daniel Mark Epstein, Barry Hannah, Jim Harrison, Joseph Heller, James Leo Herlihy, William Hjortsberg, Maxine
Kumin, Norman Mailer, Tom McGuane, Tim McLaurin, Donn Pearce, James Tiptree, Dan Wakefield, Charles Willeford and Miller Williams.
In the 1970s there is also correspondence between Crews and his friend and fellow Florida writer/screenwriter Donn Pearce
describing the screenwriting business, and an increasing flow of letters from anxious would-be producers seeking options on
his novels. This period also is marked by the appearance of correspondence with editors at Playboy and Esquire, with whom
Crews contracted to write magazine articles and (at Esquire) a monthly column, and with subsequent publishers and editors
at Atheneum, Harper & Row, and Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and at Martin Secker & Warburg in England.
In the 1990s correspondence files begin to include writers like Jay Atkinson, former student of Crews', and Mississippi novelist
Larry Brown, who first approached Crews as a fan in 1990 and with whom he would remain friends until Brown's death in 2004.
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