Ted Geltner is an associate professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, and author of Last King of the Sports Page: The Life and Career of Jim Murray. He worked for seventeen years as a writer and editor at a number of newspapers, including the Gainesville Sun, the Scranton Times-Tribune and the Ocala Star-Banner. His latest book is Blood, Bone and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews (University of Georgia Press). In 2010, Geltner drove to Gainesville, Florida, to pay a visit to Harry Crews and ask the legendary author if he would be willing to be the subject of a literary biography. The result is Blood, Bone, and Marrow, the first full-length biography of one of the most unlikely figures in twentieth-century American literature, a writer who emerged from a dirt-poor South Georgia tenant farm and went on to create a singularly unique voice of fiction. With books such as Scar Lover, Body, and Naked in Garden Hills, Crews opened a new window into southern life, focusing his lens on the poor and disenfranchised. His outlaw life, his distinctive voice and the context in which he lived combine to form a compelling narrative about an underappreciated literary treasure.
