When Harry Crews was 16, scraping through high school with the dream of someday becoming a novelist, he decided it was time to meet a real writer, face to face. He selected Frank Slaughter, a bestselling author of historical fiction, who wrote books with titles like Buccaneer Surgeon and Devil’s Gamble: A Novel of Demonology. Crews hitchhiked 110 miles south to Florida from his relatives’ place in rural Bacon County, Georgia, found Slaughter’s number in the Jacksonville phone book, and called his house to arrange an appointment. But Slaughter’s wife answered the phone, and informed Crews that the author was out getting a haircut. He immediately turned back around for Bacon County.

BLOOD, BONE, AND MARROW: A BIOGRAPHY OF HARRY CREWS by Ted Geltner University of Georgia Press, 448 pp., $32.95

“I mean, writers don’t get haircuts,” Crews said later. “I just couldn’t put together my own love of literature—the mystery, the overwhelming, profound, grandness of literature—with going to the barbershop and getting your hair cut.”

Over the next six decades, Crews made himself into the kind of writer that you could sooner imagine setting himself on fire than sitting quietly for a haircut. He cultivated an image as an outsized, Bacchanalian figure, the Lord Byron of the Okefenokee swamp, devoted equally to the arts of letters and partying. By the time of his death in 2012, Crews had published 15 novels, several collections of nonfiction, and a memoir. With his dark, often satirical writing, he had become a cult hero in certain circles, earning admiration from an odd mixture of literary and Hollywood heavyweights, including Madonna, Francis Ford Coppola, Sean Penn, Barry Hannah, and Norman Mailer.

But, as journalist Ted Geltner demonstrates in Blood, Bone, and Marrow, his clear-eyed biography of the author, Crews’s most enduring character was himself. Just fact-checking the outlandish stories about Crews’s behavior must have been daunting work. (No, he didn’t hike all the way from Georgia to Vermont to show up at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, but yes, he did once list services from a prostitute and a tattoo parlor as “business expenses” while on assignment for Playboy.) Geltner’s biography, the first of any kind on Crews, manages to unearth the writer from the accumulated crust of legend and rumor.

Born in 1935, Crews grew up the son of a tenant farmer in, as he called it, the “worst hookworm and rickets part of Georgia,” and suffered through a childhood marked with tragedy and terror. His father died before he was two years old; when he was five, Crews contracted polio, and not long after his recovery he fell into a vat of boiling water, burning almost all of the skin off his body. Geltner dutifully covers Crews’s early life, but his retelling is, unsurprisingly, no match for A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Crews’s searing memoir about his first seven years that represents the peak of his storytelling prowess.