When novelist Harry Crews passed away, he left behind novels, magazine articles and a musical legacy.  Classics Rock! compiled a list of all the musicians who were inspired by the late writer. Check it out:

In 1989, Kim Gordon (of Sonic Youth), Lydia Lunch, and Sadie Mae formed a band called Harry Crews and released one album, a collection of live performances, called Naked in Garden Hills after Crews’s novel. As Spin Magazine points out in a review, “lyrics to some of the songs—notably ‘The Knockout Artist,’ ‘The Gospel Singer,’ and ‘Car’—are inspired by Crews’s stories, though the connection is loose, a sort of Cliff’s Notes/free-association combo. Once in a while the lumbering brake-shop squall of the music suggests something of Crews’s stories….”

The Harry Crews Online Bibliography created a giant list of obituaries and essays written about Crews. Below, we’ve linked to some older articles highlighted by the website.

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Novelist Harry Crews has passed away. Above, we’ve embedded a YouTube video of the author talking to Dennis Miller about his time in the military, his E.E. Cummings-inspired tattoo and his Scar Lover novel.

He wrote many novels, including The Gospel Singer and A Feast of Snakes, but he also produced an extensive body of nonfiction work. You can explore the novelist’s prolific career at the Henry Crews Bibliography. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Vice Magazine about his work as a writing teacher:

“Well, thank God the University of Florida gave me this deal that every writer needs. I worked with 10 or 12 graduate students a year. They were just young people who thought they wanted to be fiction writers. By and large, they fell in love with the idea of being a fiction writer and then they were introduced to the slave labor of it and they pretty soon decided, “No, I don’t want to do this.” … If you’re going to write a book, you don’t know what you’re looking at. You have to disabuse them of all these ideas they have that they are sure are right but which are almost exclusively, always, all of them, wrong.

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Twilight tattoos are not the only contenders on the literary tattoo playing field. Novelist Justin Taylor and literary agent Eva Talmadge collaborated on a nonfiction compilation of literary tattoos based on their blog, tattoolit.com.

The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide came out this week from Harper Perennial and the trailer is embedded above. We caught up with the authors to talk about how the book came to be.

E = Eva Talmadge
J = Justin Taylor

Q: From your experience, which book/author receives the most tattoo requests?
E: Kurt Vonnegut and e.e. cummings are probably the most popular authors when it comes to literary tattoos.
J: And of course, if we had wanted to we could have done an entire book of just Shakespeare.

Q: Which children’s book illustrations are most popular?
E: Shel Silverstein, by far.

Q: What was the most interesting “story” behind a tattoo?
E: Best story by far is how Jamie Garvey of Gainesville, Florida, came to copy his e.e. cummings tattoo (“how do you like your blue-eyed boy now, mr. death?”) off the one and only Harry Crews.

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