Penguin Classics: 2026.

Simon & Schuster, 1992 - Fiction - 240 pages

In  his highly acclaimed 11th novel, Crews has written a wild, weird black comedy that takes place over one weekend during a women's bodybuilding  competition. A secretary has found a new life as a champion bodybuilding contender, but her turns things upside down with their redneck antics.

Shereel Dupont--who abandoned her former name, Dorothy Turnipseed, when she left Waycross, Georgia, to seek fame and fortune with bodybuilder Russell Morgan--finds her new life threatened by the arrival of her corpulent, redneck family.

Harry Eugene Crews was born during the Great Depression to sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. His father died when he was an infant and his mother quickly remarried. His mother later moved her sons to Jacksonville, Florida. 

Crews is twice divorced and is the father of two sons, Scott and Byron. His eldest son, Scott, drowned in 1964. 

Crews served in the Korean War and, following the war, enrolled at the University of Florida under the G.I. Bill. After two years of school, Crews set out on an extended motorcycle road trip. 

He returned to the University of Florida in 1958. Later, after graduating from the master's program, Crews was denied entrance to the graduate program for Creative Writing. He moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he taught English at Broward Community College. 

In 1968, Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer, was published. Crews returned to the University of Florida as an English faculty member and headed the very creative writing program, to which he had previously been denied entrance. 

Delusion is the stuff of tragedy, and what ravaged beauty Crews’s books  possess comes from their deluded sense of hope. It’s there, always, just  beyond reach: a world without hurt. After The Knockout Artist, Crews seems to have retreated once more—into resentment, addiction, the  lonely bluster of persona. 

The end of his life was marked by the same sort of brutality that  plagued its beginnings. He was no longer able to hide his flaws. 

In spring of 1997, Crews retired from UF to devote himself fully to writing. Crews published continuously since his first novel, on average of one novel per year. He died in 2012, at the age of 78. 

One  day, in 2008, alone in his house in Gainesville, he stabbed himself in the stomach with a hunting knife and yanked the blade up toward his heart. He was found in a pool of blood some hours later and taken to the hospital, where he told doctors that he’d been attacked by an old rival. He lived four more years.