Harris Wheless Reviewed Brendan Greaves’ New Biography of Terry Allen

For Cleveland Review of Books, Harris Wheless wrote about Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen, the first biography of the artist and musician Terry Allen. In the review, Wheless discusses “Allen’s creative trajectory, the recent revival of his work, and the difficult art of writing an artist’s biography.” 

He writes, “For Allen, art is experience and vice versa. ‘There is no difference,’ he has written, ‘between the “real” and the “imaginary.”‘ In this sense, Truckload of Art is just as much a biography of a mind as it is of a life or a body of work.” 

Haris Wheless is a writer  from North Carolina and an MFA candidate at Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. His work has appeared in the Oxford American, NPR, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Bandcamp Daily, and elsewhere.