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When a local man returns to Enigma, Georgia as a successful traveling evangelist, the townspeople, who idolize him, begin to attribute him with healing powers he knows he doesn't have. The celebrated first novel of Harry Crews, in its Penguin Classics debut.
A Penguin Classic
In Crews's first novel published in 1968, a gifted, idolized singer returns to his poor hometown and a life and family he is so far removed from he now holds them in contempt. The Gospel Singer reveals the absurdity of blind religious faith and idol worship, and the hypocrisy that results with the offering of money or sex. Crews grapples with race, gender, religion, and place, and steps back to divulge the secrets of his characters-including a dead girl awaiting the Gospel Singer's melodious eulogy, his dysfunctional family, a murderer, the zealous town residents, and a traveling freak show. This darkly comic, bitingly satirical, grotesque and violent-yet strangely empathetic-first novel displays Crews's brilliant literary talent that garnered critical acclaim and a cult following.
About the author
Harry Crews; Foreword by Kevin Wilson
Summary
“Harry Crews is magnificently twisted and brutally funny.” - Carl Hiaasen
A Penguin Classic
Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie Hall. But for all his fame, he is a man in mortal torment that drives him back to his obscure and wretched hometown of Enigma, Georgia. But by the time his Cadillac pulls into Enigma, he discovers an old friend is being held at tenuous bay from a lynch mob. As Harry Crews’s first novel unfolds, the Gospel Singer is forced to give way to his torment, and in doing so he reveals to the believers who have gathered at his feet just how little he is God’s man, and how much he has contributed to the corruption of each of them.
Additional text
“Flannery O’Connor on steroids.”
—John Williams, GQ
“I don’t know where [Harry Crews’s] narrative magic comes from, but it is firmly there.”
—Joseph Heller
“…a bona fide Southern writer in the vein of Flannery O’Connor, whose unvarnished language and absurdist take on life among the lower rungs of the region’s social ladder [is] shot through with a rough-and-tumble kind of empathy….it was with great pleasure that I spent last weekend reading The Gospel Singer,… a darkly funny tragedy…. The world he writes about is violent and ruthless….But there’s a point to Crews’ madness, and always present is a throughline of empathy…”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution
