A Childhood
The Biography of a Place
Penguin Publishing Group · Print & ebook · March 15, 2022
“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.
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- Who it’s for
- A layered, place-centered read that rewards lingering over memory and voice.
- Genres
- Personal Memoirs, Southern U.S. History, Cultural Heritage Lives
- Published
- Penguin Publishing Group, March 15, 2022
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Start with this bookAbout this book
“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.”
Continue reading
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.
Place and Memory
A layered, place-centered read that rewards lingering over memory and voice.
Come here for
- Harry Crews’s signature eye turned inward
- memorable place-bound recollection, not a tidy life story
Expect
- memoir braided with biography
- classic-era sensibility, unrushed and textured
Where it sits
| Personal Memoirs | 83% |
|---|---|
| Cultural Heritage Lives | 52% |
| Southern U.S. History | 44% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Personal Memoirs
- 20th-Century America
- Social Class
- Authors
- Harry Crews, Tobias Wolff
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- March 15, 2022
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Personal Memoirs