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.

Harry Crews (1935-2012), author of seventeen novels and a memoir, often wrote about characters from the Deep South-poor, disenfranchised, and considered society's outcasts and misfits-drawing the attention of readers of Southern Gothic and "grit lit". He was born during the Great Depression in Bacon County, Georgia. The recipient of numerous literary honors, Crews was named Georgia Author of the Year for fiction in 1969 for The Gospel Singer and was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Crews taught creative writing at the University of Florida for nearly thirty years.

Tobias Wolff (foreword) is the author of the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question. Wolff has received the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rea Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and in 2015, the National Medal of Arts.