The Florida novelist Harry Crews died on Wednesday, March 28, 2012. I haven’t read his books since the nineties, but for a while, I was big fan, once upon a time.

He was the author of uniquely Florida form of Southern Gothic. Even though many of works took place outside of Florida, if you were a Floridian and knew something of the state besides the coasts and beaches, you recognized the landscape as part of your home. An impoverished southern landscape unleavened by false dreams of Gone with the Wind style genteelness. No Rhett Butler ever wooed a woman in the Sunshine State.

I actually first read him in a stolen Playboy when I was kid. It was an excerpt from Body, which I realized years later when I read that novel.

His finest work, in my opinion, was the despairing A Feast of Snakes.

Florida is not known literary novelists or poets. It’s shame to lose one.