A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

by Harry Crews, Tobias Wolff Narrated by Matt Godfrey

Overview

“One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written” -The New Yorker
 
The highly acclaimed memoir of one of the most original American storytellers of the rural South

A Penguin Classic

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 and a fascination with the Sears, Roebuck catalog, with the tales of relatives and friends, he re-creates a childhood of tenderness and violence, comedy and tragedy. 

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Reading Crews, I found the courage to tell the stories I’d been amassing my whole life.”
—Mary Karr
 
“This memoir is for everyone. It’s agile, honest and built as if to last. Like its author, it’s a resilient American original.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“…the memoir is flawless, one of the finest ever written by an American….[it] answers some specific questions, namely where its author came from and how he became a writer, but it asks broader ones, too: why anyone becomes anything, how we square our pasts with our futures, and why certain things—a book, its author—are rescued from oblivion.”
—Casey Cep, The New Yorker

“Critics and awards anoint some authors as legends. Others depend on word-of-mouth and prose that stands the test of time….There is nothing folksy, never mind pastoral or genteel, about Crews. With caustic and fabulist writing, he exhumed the ghosts of America’s original sin…..Crews captured the raw essence of humanity in both fiction and nonfiction. Side by side, these reissues form the complete picture of an imperfect man who charged hard into extremes to escape his cultural inheritance.”
—Lauren Leblanc, Los Angeles Times

“Of all of Crews’ magnificent output, it is A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, first published in 1978 that is the most memorable and is written in a language that will sear the mind and memory…. There are startlingly wild scenes written with hair raising power….This review cannot begin to capture the power of the writing of Harry Crews nor the essence of this portrait of the life of a sharecropping family in the Great Depression. All that can be said is, read it. The power of the written word will never be made more clear.”
—New York Journal of Books

New York Times Book Review

Crews is, obviously, a unique southern raconteur. . . . It's easy to despise poor folks. A Childhood makes it more difficult. It raises almost to a level of heroism these people who seem of a different century. A Childhood is not about a forgotten America, it is about a part of America that has rarely, except in books like this, been properly discovered.

New York Newsday

It is Crews' great gift that he can show us how absolutely cursed, and alsolutely beautiful, we are. . . . Crews burns through the easy ways in which we would like to regard ourselves; what he leaves behind is something better, something touched by the refiner's fire.

New York Times - Dwight Garner

A Childhood is the best introduction to his work. It explains so much of where Crews was coming from in his blood-tinted fiction. . . . This memoir has a foot in another world, a weird, old Depression-era America. Crews writes with knowledge and feeling on a wide series of topics, from farming to factory work (his mother later takes a job at a cigar-making factory) to food and sex. . . . This memoir is for everyone. It’s agile, honest and built as if to last. Like its author, it’s a resilient American original.

Narrative - Richard Gilbert

The book itself is a work of art, beautifully produced by University of Georgia Press and illustrated by gorgeous woodcuts of key moments in the narrative. . . . Crews achieves a persona remarkable for reflecting from the writer's present while conveying the world and viewpoint of the five-year-old who gets scalded one day at a hog boiling and the boy who later is incapacitated by polio.

Library Journal

★ 05/01/2022

Already known for distilling the grotesqueries of his native rural South into viciously intoxicating fictions, in 1978 Crews recounted his hardscrabble upbringing in Bacon County, GA, resulting in one of the most moving and powerful memoirs ever written. A mere synopsis of the hardships of death, disease, injury, drunkenness, violence, and plain bad luck that beset Crews and his kin, for whom at times "being alive was like being awake in a nightmare," hardly suggests the resonant beauty of this telling. Born into a culture of story, Crews counts among his formative influences spinning tales about the beautiful and curiously unmaimed people in the Sears Roebuck catalog, sometimes with the assistance of his friend Willalee's superannuated grandma Auntie, born into slavery and given to strange, shamanistic proclamations. Auntie, he recalls, "made the best part of me." VERDICT In rough-hewn speech fluent as a river and forceful as a hammer blow, Crews captures the warmth, dignity, and brutality of his people and their fierce and awful devotion to home. This is his masterpiece.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178440070
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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