Childhood

1935, Bacon County, Georgia. The bite of the Great Depression was beginning to be felt in the rest of America, but its teeth had been in Bacon County for years. Here one of America's most original storytellers, Harry Crews, was born in a sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road. A Childhood is his memoir of that time - his first years of life - and that place: the poor soil and the sickness, the blood feuds and the faith healers, the ghosts and the shopping catalogues.

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.

Reviews

“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