American author Harry Crews has died. The New York Times reports the hard-living, adventure-seeking novelist, memoirist, journalist, retired university professor, and icon in Southern American literature, died in Gainesville, Florida, from complications of neuropathy. He was 76.

Crews created a cast of misfits, outlaws, and freaks to occupy the brutal worlds he wrote about in his 17 novels, and many short stories, novellas, and plays. In 1978, Crews wrote a startling memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. He also wrote columns for Esquire and Playboy throughout the ’70s.

From the Times:

Though his books captivated many reviewers, they were not the stuff of bestseller lists, in part because they bewildered some readers and repelled others. But they attracted a cadre of fans so fiercely devoted that the phrase cult following seems inadequate to describe their ardor…. Despite their teeming decadence, or more likely because of it, Mr. Crews’s novels betray a fundamental empathy, chronicling his characters’ search for meaning in a dissolute, end-stage world. His ability to spin out a dark, glittering thread from this tangle of souls gave him a singular voice that could make his prose riveting…. To critics who taxed him with sensationalism, Mr. Crews ” a plainspoken ex-Marine, ex-boxer, ex-bouncer, and ex-barker ” replied, in effect, that it took decadence to lampoon decadence. His actual replies are largely unprintable.

(Video: via Melville House)