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Childhood : The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews (2022, Trade Paperback)
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- Buy It NowA Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Crews, Harry (0143135333) Paperback
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
ISBN-100143135333
ISBN-139780143135333
eBay Product ID (ePID)23050038023
Product Key Features
Book TitleChildhood : the Biography of a Place
Number of Pages192 Pages
LanguageEnglish
TopicUnited States / 20th Century, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Personal Memoirs
Publication Year2022
GenreSocial Science, Biography & Autobiography, History
AuthorHarry Crews
FormatTrade Paperback
Dimensions
Item Height0.4 in
Item Weight5.2 Oz
Item Length7.6 in
Item Width5 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2021-029407
TitleLeadingA
Dewey Edition20
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, "What's impressive about A Childhood is not how it faithfully documents the past. It's how, through stories, it grants some coherence to an otherwise rootless existence. Writing, Crews seemed to believe, was a thread through the maze, a means of imagining a place and a people to whom he could lay claim." --Charlie Lee, Harper's "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, "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 "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, "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 "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, "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
Dewey Decimal813/.54 B
Synopsis"One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written" - The New Yorker " A Childhood has been widely recognized as a masterpiece, a Dickensian document of survival and blight in Depression-era Georgia." -Harper's 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.
LC Classification NumberPS3553.R46Z46 2022
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Ratings and Reviews
Most relevant reviews
- May 08, 2022
Heavyweight with compelling details of another time and another place.
Harry Crews’ A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is a book I discovered last month. It is a memoir about Crews early childhood. It’s not a pretty tale. Indeed, in many ways, Childhood is about surviving, by the skin of his teeth, a hardscrabble, painful childhood in Bacon County Georgia during the Great Depression. In powerful, taut prose he credibly describes near fatal accidents, a bout of polio, domestic violence, fights and flights and escapes. To escape Bacon County he joined the Marines. After his Marine service he took advantage of the GI Bill and studied literature and writing, taught at the University of Florida, and wrote many short stories, memoirs, novels and essays. His childhood and youth shaped the man he became and while he was not, perhaps, always a good man -he was a macho, drank and took drugs, brawled and enjoyed ‘blood sports,’ philandered and caroused- he wrote like an angel. And he’s honest to the bone. Suffice it to say, this book is not for the faint-hearted. But it is spot-on in finding a voice for a small child experiencing life in rural Georgia, full of details of black and white lives led, of a Jewish peddler, of faith-healers, of hell-and-brimstone preachers, of folk medicine, of the kindness, cruelty, and cupidity of neighbors, of the magnetic importance of a home-place. Beyond that he describes the lives of mules, pigs, dogs, cattle, the rigors of picking cotton, the joys of fishing and hunting, the beauty of nature, trees, water, swamps and hills, and he limps and runs through the countryside, breathing deep and swearing and figuring out the secrets of life. He imagines, based on talking to older relatives and neighbors, the lives of his father and mother, grandparents, uncles and aunts. He writes of all this and more in economic yet vivid anecdotes and mesmerizing and exquisite prose. Chapter six is particularly brilliant in its evocation of Bacon County. One of the first ‘grown-up’ books I read was Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I had been primed for the book because both my stepfather and my mother were brought up poor and in desperate straits during the Great Depression. They told me stories of hunger and abandonment, squalor and despair, resistance and cruelty. But their stories ended, no matter how difficult, with inexplicable grace notes. Both could tell tales, tall and otherwise, that vividly evoked spin tales, the past before I was born. Later I would read B. Traven’s Death Ship [1934], Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy [1930-1936], Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker [1954] and Billy Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues [1956.. All of these tales moved me and fired up my curiosity about the world, about history, and about the craft of story-telling. All of them introduced me to people and places that, otherwise, I could never have imagined. And as Ken Kesey once said, whether the tales happened or not they were true.Verified purchase: YesCondition: New
