A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Hardcover)

by Harry Crews (Author) "MY FIRST MEMORY is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves..." (more)
Key Phrases: buggy frame, syrup bucket, Uncle Alton, Bacon County, Springfield Section (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This is a memoir of Harry Crew's earliest years - a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales and circumstances that shaped him and destined him to become a storyteller. The book includes accounts of grinding poverty, but also of snakes who could talk, and of ghosts and devils.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 182 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (October 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820317594
• ISBN-13: 978-0820317595
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #114,038 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 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)

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

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

8 of 8 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

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".