A childhood, the biography of a place - Hardcover

A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews's earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him - and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural south Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay. At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives".

Harry Crews is the author of eighteen novels, including "The Mulching of America." He teaches at the University of Florida. Michael McCurdy is an internationally known illustrator and designer whose work has appeared in the books of over thirty publishers and in such magazines as the "New Yorker," "Esquire," and "Field and Stream." He lives in Massachusetts.