Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry…

Childhood: The Biography of a Place (original 1978; edition 1978)

by Harry Crews (Author)

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316	8	82,547	(4.41)	11

larryerick's review

I'm not sure I'm a good enough writer to properly articulate how good this book is. The author, writing of his own life as young child in the Great Depression and early war years in the Deep South, matched and at times transcended some of the finest of American literature. While the time span is much later, I found this book very reminiscent in its presentation to the fictional Twain book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The intimate reflections of the main character, awash with both the simplicities and complexities of the world around him, is very similar. There are elements of one of my very favorite books, As I Lay Dying, but the humor is not offered so readily. At the same time, there is a reservoir of pain and suffering depicted that is not offered up for sympathy, but as mere facts of a very real existence. Ultimately, this book felt like a thank-you to his childhood family and friends for helping him survive -- just barely -- a very tough life. Highly recommended. (

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larryerick | Apr 26, 2018 |

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Love and hatred roll together in a marriage when there are few scraps of comfort to be shared. Dogs assume human characteristics and even mules rule. This is a depiction of a precarious, hard scrabble life with a “gothic southern” intensity. The author’s friendship with his black neighbour and the sharecropper’s son stands to breakup up my Northerner stereotyping of racist redneck farmers. Crews was lucky to survive his childhood, that’s clear. (

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joannajuki | Dec 2, 2023 |

Harry Crews always does a number on me, and especially so with this autobiographical account of his childhood. I grew up in the South when it still resembled the South of Crews' time. The folks and places he describes with his unique, vivid style are my people and my home. Somehow Southerners seem to love harder and deeper, and Crews captures this so well in this book, it often made me read sections over again, moving me to tears, sometimes from happiness, sometimes from pain. This is a magnificent piece of art. (

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MickeyMole | Oct 2, 2023 |

3.7 (

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Mcdede | Jul 19, 2023 |

Part 1 of this memoir details incidents from the life of Harry’s father in Florida and Bacon County, Georgia, where Harry was born. This is a story of hardship and an early death, told in a plain, dry style.
Part 2 provides scenes from Harry’s young life, again told in a simple, but powerfully direct, style. For example, there is a story of how Harry’s dog, Sam, helps to tire and subdue a frightened cow, so that medicine can be applied to hopefully save the cow - a simple story, but real in showing how life was lived. The dog wasn’t a pet, but a working animal.
Then there are stories that point towards Harry’s future as a writer, such as making up stories to connect pictures in a Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue.

A short memoir of a very hard early life, childhood as the book only takes Harry to when he’s about six or seven, which is authentic and genuine, even as it is made clear that this was a not unusual experience of early twentieth century America.

But whatever I am has its source back there in Bacon County, from which I left when I was seventeen years old to join the Marine Corps, and to which I never returned to live. I have always known, though, that part of me never left, could never leave, the place where I was born and, further, that what has been most significant in my life had all taken place by the time I was six years old. (

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CarltonC | Apr 24, 2023 |

I had never heard of Harry Crews until a co-worker mentioned him to me recently. It's a shame that it seems like he has fallen out of popularity because his memoir is amazing. (

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BibliophageOnCoffee | Aug 12, 2022 |

One of the most powerful, and beautifully written, memoirs I have ever read. That's all there is to say. Read it if you haven't. (

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nmele | Sep 19, 2019 |

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larryerick | Apr 26, 2018 |

Beautifully written, and raw, account of the author's first six years growing up in abject, underline abject, poverty in rural Georgia during the Depression. This book is full of riveting stories, as were the lives of the people, Harry Crews' people, that it tells. But I think what I will take away from this book is a conviction that poverty is evil, and a new knowledge of what it does to the people living in it. (

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MarthaHuntley | Mar 13, 2010 |

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