Childhood: The Biography of a Place [Hardcover]

Harry Crews (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1978

A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews' earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him--and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural South Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay.

At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."

Amid portraits of relatives and neighbors, Bacon County lore, and details of farm life, Crews tells of his father's death; his friendship with Willalee Bookatee, the son of a black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather's failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. These and other memories define, with reverence and affection, Harry Crews's childhood world: "its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness." Imaginative and gripping, A Childhood re-creates in detail one writer's search for past and self, a search for a time and place lost forever except in memory.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

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 Times Book Review

"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 Newsday

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Harry Crews is the author of eighteen novels, including The Mulching of America. He teaches at the University of Florida. Michael McCurdy is an internationally known illustrator and designer whose work has appeared in the books of over thirty publishers and in such magazines as the New Yorker, Esquire, and Field and Stream. He lives in Massachusetts.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 171 pages
• Publisher: Harper & Row; 1st edition (September 1978)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060109327
• ISBN-13: 978-0060109325
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,070,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Harry Crews' Materpiece, March 15, 2000

By 

Terrill Bravender (Durham, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Hardcover)

Although this book is not a typical work by the literate master of the hard South, it is a testament to his talent. This book made me see and feel the life of a 6 year old dirt farmer in Bacon Co, Georgia, and also give some insight into the basis of characters in Crews' fictional works. This is one of the best quasi-memoirs ever written, and even has a slight belief in human goodness not seen in his other work. Mr. Crews' more typical works (such as Feast of Snakes or All We Need of Hell) are very good novels in their own right, yet Childhood stands apart and above all of his other books combined. If you read nothing else by Harry Crews (which is not a good idea--you should read many of his books), this is the one to choose.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a book that defies definition., July 30, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Hardcover)

Crew's A Childhood: Biography of a Place is not a novel, nor is it a history, biography, autobiography, or memoir in any traditional sense, rather it seems to be all these quilted together. A Childhood recounts the author's earliest memories of his upbringing in rural Georgia, as well as a fictionalized account of his father who died before the author's birth. This book is a testament to his childhood playmates and the folks that were kind to his poverty stricken family, as well as to the first fictional characters he conjured up out of the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. The book recounts a great many firsts, from the first time he ate grapefruit, to the first time he "started and nearly finished a detective novel, although at the time I had never seen a novel, detective or otherwise," to the first personal encounter with death. The "place" made mention of in the subtitle is the author's home of Bacon County, which has become a mythic landscape for me; I think of it in the same way many think

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for Yankees and children of the south alike, December 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Hardcover)

I was assigned this book in a tutorial class on the "mind of the south" by a professor during my senior year of college. I was immediately drawn to the author's experiences with tenant farming; being the son of a mother whose own father was a farmer that oversaw several tenents to his own farming operation prior to, and shortly after WWII. Crew's accurate depection of tenant farmer life was valididated, to this reader at least, by his portrayal of an agricultural system that was difficult to not only rural agricultural African Americans, but their white supervisors. Crews has done a wonderful job of incorporating the distinctly southern phrases and dialogue of the rural, agrarian south. I though my own mother was the only person who pronounced "hurricane" as "harrakin". Charachters such as Willalee Bookatee and his family were strikingly similar to those poor blacks, and whites, described in my mother's stories of working in the tobacco fields of rural NC. This book will shed some much needed light on the fact that the hard-core, rural south is not so far removed from the remodeled "New South".