A Childhood, the Biography of a Place

I was only recently introduced to Harry Crews, but this memoir should be required prior to reading any of his compelling fiction. One does not need to know about Mr. Crews to enjoy his fiction, but to read this book first is to build an affinity for the author. His memories of southern Georgia during the great depression and war years are the most accurate in tone of any non-fiction that has come out of the South. He has been linked to Flannery O'Connor, but to me he seems to be a more existential William Faulkner.

I would suggest this book to anyone who has ever read anything published by Harry Crews; specifically to those who haven't read anything by him, but who are interested in this magnificent author. After reading it, I found myself wondering how Crews was able to escape childhood, much less become of the the greatest Southern authors since Faulkner. Truly a fantastic book that will stand the test of time and inevitably cast Crews as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century!

I was assigned this book in a tutorial class on the "mind of the south" by a professor during my senior year of college. I was immediately drawn to the author's experiences with tenant farming; being the son of a mother whose own father was a farmer that oversaw several tenents to his own farming operation prior to, and shortly after WWII. Crew's accurate depection of tenant farmer life was valididated, to this reader at least, by his portrayal of an agricultural system that was difficult to not only rural agricultural African Americans, but their white supervisors. Crews has done a wonderful job of incorporating the distinctly southern phrases and dialogue of the rural, agrarian south. I though my own mother was the only person who pronounced "hurricane" as "harrakin". Charachters such as Willalee Bookatee and his family were strikingly similar to those poor blacks, and whites, described in my mother's stories of working in the tobacco fields of rural NC. This book will shed some much needed light on the fact that the hard-core, rural south is not so far removed from the remodeled "New South".

Although this book is not a typical work by the literate master of the hard South, it is a testament to his talent. This book made me see and feel the life of a 6 year old dirt farmer in Bacon Co, Georgia, and also give some insight into the basis of characters in Crews' fictional works. This is one of the best quasi-memoirs ever written, and even has a slight belief in human goodness not seen in his other work. Mr. Crews' more typical works (such as Feast of Snakes or All We Need of Hell) are very good novels in their own right, yet Childhood stands apart and above all of his other books combined. If you read nothing else by Harry Crews (which is not a good idea--you should read many of his books), this is the one to choose.

Crew's A Childhood: Biography of a Place is not a novel, nor is it a history, biography, autobiography, or memoir in any traditional sense, rather it seems to be all these quilted together. A Childhood recounts the author's earliest memories of his upbringing in rural Georgia, as well as a fictionalized account of his father who died before the author's birth. This book is a testament to his childhood playmates and the folks that were kind to his poverty stricken family, as well as to the first fictional characters he conjured up out of the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. The book recounts a great many firsts, from the first time he ate grapefruit, to the first time he "started and nearly finished a detective novel, although at the time I had never seen a novel, detective or otherwise," to the first personal encounter with death. The "place" made mention of in the subtitle is the author's home of Bacon County, which has become a mythic landscape for me; I think of it in the same way many think