A Childhood: The Biography of a Place review – a classic of the deep south | Biography books

IThe cult fa writer’s aura lasts long enough, and their work may live up to the status of Penguin Classics. At Leas, that’s what happened Harry Cruzauthor of numerous Southern Gothic novels inhabited by whimsy and sorcery, including his most famous novel, Snakes feast. Born in Georgia in 1935, Cruz passed away in 2012 and claimed to have sold just a few thousand hardcover books during his lifetime (a series of famous fans including Sean Penn and Madonna failed to translate into mainstream popularity). Having published eight novels in as many years, starting with Gospel singer In 1968, in his forties, Crews turned to fiction to recount the first six years of his life alive and testify to a “lifestyle gone forever out of the world”. his diary Childhood: a biography of Makan It was first published in 1978 and has now been reissued (along with Gospel singer) With a loving foreword by Tobias Wolf. In the United States, there was a similar outburst of enthusiasm for Crews and his work, with The New Yorker description recently childhood as “one of the finest memoirs ever written by an American”.

Childhood memoirs (and novels) have a formal difficulty with the very essence of childhood itself: If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. While adult lives, differentiated by occupation, sexual function, and cumulative experience are infinitely diverse, all childhoods are fundamentally the same–which is why the subtitle of Crews’ book is so crucial. Cured meat…