Three Lives: A Nonfiction Reading

Blood, Bone, and Marrow, by Ted Geltner, is the first full-length biography of one of the most unlikely figures in twentieth-century American literature, Harry Crews, a writer who emerged from a dirt-poor South Georgia tenant farm and went on to create a singularly unique voice of fiction. Walter Shapiro’s Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Fuhrer, tells the true story of how his great-uncle—a Jewish vaudeville impresario and exuberant con man—managed to cheat Hitler’s agents in the run-up to WWII. Tom Shroder’s The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family is a biography of the author’s grandfather, MacKinlay Kantor, the author of Andersonville, the seminal novel of the Civil War.