A Childhood: The Biography Of A Place

Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way. 

Interweaving his own memories including his bout with polio with the tales of relatives and friends, and that place - the poor soil and the sickness, the blood feuds and the faith healers, the ghosts and the shopping catalogues - he re-creates a childhood of tenderness and violence, comedy and tragedy.

"What Woolf wrote of Dickens is true of Crews: he has astonishing powers of characterization, and he sketches full figures with striking simplicity. Such individuals could seem like caricatures, except that they are seen as children see: with attention, curiosity, and awe... The beauty of A Childhood... is that it animates nostalgia and then annihilates it. Crews never says that it was better then or he is better now, only that this is who he is and this is how it was."  -  The New Yorker

A profound vision of the rural South that resounds with the violence of poverty and the tenderness of kinship, A Childhood is a true American classic.