A Childhood

The Biography of a Place

By: Harry Crews, Tobias Wolff - foreword

Narrated by: Matt Godfrey

“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.

©2022 Harry Crews (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“…the memoir is flawless, one of the finest ever written by an American….[it] answers some specific questions, namely where its author came from and how he became a writer, but it asks broader ones, too: why anyone becomes anything, how we square our pasts with our futures, and why certain things—a book, its author—are rescued from oblivion.”
—Casey Cep, The New Yorker

“Critics and awards anoint some authors as legends. Others depend on word-of-mouth and prose that stands the test of time….There is nothing folksy, never mind pastoral or genteel, about Crews. With caustic and fabulist writing, he exhumed the ghosts of America’s original sin…..Crews captured the raw essence of humanity in both fiction and nonfiction. Side by side, these reissues form the complete picture of an imperfect man who charged hard into extremes to escape his cultural inheritance.”
—Lauren Leblanc, Los Angeles Times

“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…. There are startlingly wild scenes written with hair raising power….This review cannot begin to capture the power of the writing of Harry Crews nor the essence of this portrait of the life of a sharecropping family in the Great Depression. All that can be said is, read it. The power of the written word will never be made more clear.”
—New York Journal of Books

My Progressive Friends Need to Read This Bio

Ever since I saw Harry Crews' cameo in the documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, I've been fascinated by his writing. It's not as if Crews' writing is some sort of Southern Freak Show...it's not. What he does is tell the rest of us non-Southerners that Southerners are unapologetically who they are, that they usually survive their traumas and archaic ways, and that they willingly interface with the modern world without shame or malice. Harry Crews invites us to understand that Southerners need not apologize for how their sense of place has shaped them.

This biography is a lesson in humility for the reader (particularly new progressives). Keep an open mind, we are all Americans after all (unless you are not).

astonishing

in the very recent past, in the America I hubristically think I know, this stunning memoir, replete with unknown phrases and desperate humanity in it's beauty and terror, is recorded here. READ this!!!

Thank god for Harry Crews

I absolutely love every book Mr. Crews has written. I never wanted this one to end. A sad, tough, humorous book that hits you in every spot human. It doesn’t get much better. RIP Mr Crews. Thank you for everything. JST-

A True Walk Through the Past

Loved it. So many fond memories of the time and places in spite of the many sad events.

Amazing tale but wrong narrator

No big issues but Harry Crews reader deserves a tougher voice. More gruff and grit.

Great read

If you want, an excellent walk, back in time, told in the first person, this is a great read. Well written, great story.

Story rings true

Short of a few exaggerations this book describes farming in Bacon county in the 30’s to 60’s. I heard some great storytellers at Cartertown grocery. Although by late 50’s many farmers had a lot more machinery to help. My grandfather was Jesse Boatright but by 1962, when I started coming up each summer, he had no sharecroppers. Though an uncle sharecropper all his life I later learned.

Familiar Places

very cool story, well read, and i currently live on 8th St in Springfield (Jax) so that was a pleasant surprise to hear familiar places 🤙🏽😊

Visceral Accounting of Childhood

I loved this story! It was brutal and beautiful all at the same time. It helped me to understand a time, place and people. Georgia in the 20’s and 30’s was hard living. I’m so glad that Harry Crews lent his voice and experience. Americana at its best.

Fantastic.

Even with only cursory knowledge of life growing up in the south, I found this fascinating and enjoyable.