A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Crews, Harry. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780820317595.

<p><i>A Childhood</i> is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him&mdash;and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecroppers cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural South Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay.<br><br>At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, <i>A Childhood</i> not only recalls the transforming events of Crewss youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world &quot;in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives.&quot;<br><br>Amid portraits of relatives and neighbors, Bacon County lore, and details of farm life, Crews tells of his fathers death; his friendship with Willalee Bookatee, the son of a black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfathers failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. These and other memories define, with reverence and affection, Harry Crewss childhood world: &quot;its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness.&quot; Imaginative and gripping, <i>A Childhood</i> re-creates in detail one writers search for past and self, a search for a time and place lost forever except in memory.</p>