“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. 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.

For the first time in Penguin Classics, Harry Crews's highly acclaimed, evocative literary memoir of his Depression-era childhood in the rural South.

A Penguin Classic



Considered by Mary Karr as the "most overlooked" of the best memoirs ever written, A Childhood by Harry Crews captures the first six years of his life among impoverished tenant farmer families in rural southern Georgia. Crews shares details of farm life, his father's death, his friendship with the son of a Black hired hand, his bout with polio, his mother and stepfather's failing marriage, his near-fatal scalding at a hog killing, and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida.



The best introduction to Crews's acclaimed fiction, his memoir, A Childhood, in its portrait of the people, locales, circumstances, and Bacon County lore that shaped him, offers a foundation of the writer's outlook; the refuge he found in his storytelling imagination; and his reverence and affection for the outsider, the outcast, and those considered freakish.

“Reading Crews, I found the courage to tell the stories I’d been amassing my whole life.”
—Mary Karr
 
“This memoir is for everyone. It’s agile, honest and built as if to last. Like its author, it’s a resilient American original.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“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