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Top of the pile
95
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
90/100Critics
96/100Scholars
98/100Author:
Harry Crews, Tobias Wolff
Publisher:
Penguin Classics
Date:
March 15, 2022
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.
What The Reviewers Say
The most indelible scene in American literary memoir, for this reader at any rate, occurs about two-thirds of the way into Harry Crews’s A Childhood.
[Crews'] novels...were flawed, but the memoir is flawless, one of the finest ever written by an American.
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.
In rough-hewn speech fluent as a river and forceful as a hammer blow, Crews captures the warmth, dignity, and brutality of his people and their fierce and awful devotion to home. This is his masterpiece..
