Comments on: The Works of Max Crawford

By: GEORGE CIRKOVIC

GEORGE CIRKOVIC — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:16:26 +0000

Just read about the passing of Max Crawford. While visiting my mother-in-law
in Lubbock, driving around town looking for the old cemetery, I caught a highway sign that read “Floydada, 45 miles”. Drove out, pilgrimage style, like
Marc Cohn in “Walking in Memphis”. Flat, foreboding, arrid, with an orange paradox of the biggest bunch of pumpkins I ever saw. Max may have left the place and gone half round the world, but in the end he boomeranged all the way back home.
He was not at the Dairy Queen, nor the local library, certainly not in the sheriff’s office, but he gave me a big wink from the low sailing clouds, from way up in those blue skies of West Texas. It’s as though he was saying, “It ain’t much, but it’s home.” Finally at peace.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 20:10:08 +0000

Hi, everyone.

I’m a scholar writing what I believe to be the first book-length treatment of Max Crawford’s fiction. My intention is to bring Max and his work back into public view and clarify why he is urgently important.

It’s primarily about his first two books, *The Backslider* and *Waltz Across Texas*, with a small discussion of *Lords of the Plain*. To a large extent, it explores the depth of meaning he found in his home region, the caprock and the breaks at the southeastern point of the Texas Panhandle.

If anyone knew Max or knows anyone who knew him, especially in Floydada, please let me know.

Thanks.

By: Cy Whitfill

Cy Whitfill — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 02:28:10 +0000

I just read a posting by Max Crawford’s cousin indicating that Max passed away on October 7, 2010. May he rest in peace.

By: chip fraser

chip fraser — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:59:22 +0000

strange that this review of Crawford’s work leaves out any mention of his “The Bad Communist” (1979), concerning northern California Maoism from August to November 1972. This book is definitely not an unforgettable piece of writing, rather what appears to be a hastily-slapped-together roman à clef dishing the barely-veiled dirt on the Venceremos organization. Of little literary significance and considerable political-historical significance for anyone interested in the 60s “New Left”. It would be very interesting to learn more about this phase of Crawford’s life…

By: J_McCarthy@ymail.com

J_McCarthy@ymail.com — Tue, 26 May 2009 01:44:58 +0000

I am a cook at the retirement home in Missoula,MT where mr.Crawford resides and had recently looked his name up because i had heard he was an author..His work seems very interesting to me and i look forward to reading his books..I have tried talking to him but his it seems as though his dementia is too severe to hold conversation.

By: William N. Thomas

William N. Thomas — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:32:11 +0000

Good to see a home town do well.

By: Joe Smalley

Joe Smalley — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:51:12 +0000

Max Crawford called me “Pepe” when we were in high school together in Floydada, Texas. In our production of Thornton Wilders “Our Town”, which was his request of our teacher/director, he played Mr. Webb and I played George Gibbs. This was more than fifty years ago and I have just learned of his present circumstances. I wish I could sit and talk with him about Waltz Across Texas and Lords of the Plain and Six Key Cut. I have just learned about Eastertown and Wamba. They are on my immediate list. A high school friend I have never forgotten, a writer whose work I love, a man who grew so far beyond his beginings; I will always hold him with affection in my heart.

By: peter kinsley

peter kinsley — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:38:55 +0000

May I add a PS to my earlier comment? How many books by American authors have kept an American President awake all night because it was “unputdownable”? President Ronald Reagan was given “Lords of the Plain” along with a cattle-drive book by Larry McMurtry. Next day Nancy Reagan told the White House Cultural Adviser: “Please don’t give any more books by Max Crawford to the President. He was awake all night reading it, and he fell aleep during a meeting this morning.”
It is time the Universities of Texas and Oklahoma gave some kind of award to Max Crawford. In England or Scotland he would be given a Doctorate. He is seriously ill and has dedicated his life to writing: writing which will be of benefit to students in years to come.

By: peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com

peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:06:40 +0000

There is hope for literature in America when thinking men like John Holt read, digest and explain some of the works of Max Crawford, a true literateur (or what the French call “Homme de Lettres), This American author spent his life as a dedicated writer, starting each day, at the crack of dawn on a regime that never altered and with which he never faltered. French cafe owners called him “Le Professeur” because, Like Hem, he liked to write in cafes in Moliere’s town of Pezenas in SW France. Alan Sillitoe carried a copy of Lords of the Plain reverently to his publisher and agent in London, who just did not recognize a classic when it was pushed under their noses. Everything Mr. Holt says about the literary scene is true, and Max Crawford knew it and soldiered on. That’s what we do: we soldier on … the moving hand has writ….But poor Max is now in a nursing home in Montana, suffering from dementia. The pen is laid aside, the first cafe au lait of his writing morning a distant memory. The last I heard from him he wrote that he had to put his gloves on to watch the weather forecast in Livingston, and he told Michael Koepf, another great American author, that he was reading his memoir “to see how it ends…” When Louis Zukofsky visited Ezra pound during his last days in New York he said: “It’s a sad world, anyway. Not many of us will get out of it alive.” A hundred years from now American students will read Lords of the Plain as an example of English prose at its best. It is the prose equal to Alexander Kinglake, Churchill’s favourite author. Max Crawford will still be alive and well….