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For the first time in Penguin Classics, Harry Crews's highly acclaimed, evocative literary memoir of his Depression-era childhood in the rural South.
A Penguin Classic
Considered by Mary Karr as the "most overlooked" of the best memoirs ever written, A Childhood by Harry Crews captures the first six years of his life among impoverished tenant farmer families in rural southern Georgia. Crews shares details of farm life, his father's death, his friendship with 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.
The best introduction to Crews's acclaimed fiction, his memoir, A Childhood, in its portrait of the people, locales, circumstances, and Bacon County lore that shaped him, offers a foundation of the writer's outlook; the refuge he found in his storytelling imagination; and his reverence and affection for the outsider, the outcast, and those considered freakish.
About the author
Harry Crews (1935-2012) was born during the Great Depression in rural Georgia, USA. He is the author of seventeen novels and a memoir, often revolving around poor and disenfranchised characters from the Deep South. Crews taught creative writing at the University of Florida for nearly thirty years, mentoring and inspiring a generation of writers and gaining the reputation of a literary outsider and outlaw with a singular voice in American fiction. He is today considered a pillar of the Southern Gothic tradition.
Summary
“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.
Additional text
“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
