A Childhood

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.