Charlie Lee

1 week ago | harpers.org | Charlie Lee

One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact particularly exceptional. This was Bacon County, Georgia, where in those days “it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife,” as he wrote in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.