The Damned Don’t Cry, They Just Disappear: The Life and Works of Harry Hervey
by Harlan Greene
University of South Carolina Press. 184 pages. $29.99
IN 1993, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction bestseller, detailed the dark underside of Savannah, Georgia. As it turns out, nearly fifty years earlier, a writer named Harry Hervey had published a novel called The Damned Don’t Cry that was also about the seamy side of life in that city. Hervey’s works are largely forgotten today despite being bestsellers when they first came out. What’s more, a closer inspection reveals that his fiction and screenplays dealt with gay themes to a surprising degree, and that he lived a daringly open life as a gay man with his lover, despite the strictures of the time. [A feature piece on Hervey appeared in these pages in the May-June 2017 issue.]
