Modern American Memoirs
Harry Crews(1935) Harry Crews was born the son of a farmer in Bacon County, Georgia, and grew up there. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a sergeant, then attended the University of Florida, where he became a professor of English in 1974.
Author of more than a dozen novels, from The Gospel Singer (1968) to Scar Lover (1992), Crews has also written stories, essays, and nonfiction.
Crews's memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, describes the first six years of his life, under circumstances "where there wasn't enough money to close up a dead man's eyes." His family lived on a series of tenant farms in Bacon County. His father died when he was two. The "daddy" in this memoir is his stepfather, whom he loved. Later he learned that this man was his uncle.
From A Childhood
It has always seemed to me that I was not so much born into this life as I awakened to it. I remember very distinctly the awakening and the morning it happened. It was my first glimpse of myself, and all that I know now--the stories, and everything conjured up by them, that I have been writing about thus far--I obviously kn ... read full excerpt from Modern American Memoirs ebook
