A Childhood

“What’s impressive about A Childhood is not how it faithfully documents the past. It’s how, through stories, it grants some coherence to an otherwise rootless existence. Writing, Crews seemed to believe, was a thread through the maze, a means of imagining a place and a people to whom he could lay claim.” —Charlie Lee, Harper’s

“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

“…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

Harry Crews was born in 1935 in Alma, Bacon County, Georgia. His father died before Harry was two. A childhood paralysis, a scalding accident, his mother’s turbulent second marriage and divorce, and a move to Jacksonville, Florida, fueled his desire to write.

Crews served in the Marine Corps and attended the University of Florida on the GI Bill, earning degrees in literature and education. He taught English at the high school and junior college levels. A protege of Andrew Lytle, Crews published his first short story in the Sewanee Review in 1962 and his first novel, The Gospel Singer, in 1968.

His subsequent novels include Naked in Garden Hills (1969), Car (1972), The Hawk Is Dying (1973) (adapted into a film), The Gypsy’s Curse (1974), and A Feast of Snakes (1976). Crews also wrote for magazines such as Esquire and Playboy, and penned screenplays.

His memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, was published in 1978. Two compilations of his nonfiction, Blood and Grits and Florida Frenzy, were released in 1979 and 1982. After a period of substance abuse, Crews published his ninth novel, All We Need of Hell, in 1987.

He retired from teaching at the University of Florida after thirty years. Crews, who died in 2012, is recognized as a prominent figure in the Grit Lit genre. His literary influences include William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Erskine Caldwell. Crews’s eighteen novels, including Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit (1971), The Knockout Artist (1988), and Body (1990), along with his nonfiction and memoirs, cemented his legacy.

In 2002, Harry Crews was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

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