Harry crews childhood
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A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
Here is a link to a wonderful retrospective look at Crews' book by Dwight Garner in his "American Beauties" column in the New York Times:
I especially agree with his conclusion:
His novels, which are mostly out of print, aren’t for everyone, despite my abiding fondness for several of them.
This memoir is for everyone. It’s agile, honest and built as if to last. Like its author, it’s a resilient American original.
When Harry Crews died in , Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “[t]he word ‘original’ only begins to describe Crews, whose 17 novels place him squarely in the Southern gothic tradition, also known as Grit Lit. He emerged from a grisly childhood in Georgia with a darkly comic vision that made him literary kin to William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Hunter S. Thompson, although he never achieved their broad recognition.”
In , he began a long tenure on the University of Florida
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A Childhood
On June 7, , Harry Crews is born in Alma, Georgia, a small rural community located in Bacon County. His parents are desperately poor tenant farmers struggling to survive mitt i the Great Depression. When Harry fryst vatten only two years old, his father dies of a heart attack, leaving his mother in an even more desperate condition than before. In need of a partner, his mother marries her dead husband's brother, a man Crews says, "might have been a good father had he not been a brutal drunk." For much of his childhood, Harry has no idea this man is not his biological father. Harry's stepfather also frequently reaches for his shotgun when drinking and in arguments w
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Unless, that is, you are a real muleman, in which case you can get the age of a mule from how his haunches sit, how he walks, whether he has stiff joints or sore spots, how shiny his coat is, and whether he kicks. Any market invites fraud, though, and mulemen are matched by mouth doctors, who, for a dollar if they aren’t very good or for five if they are, will use a drill to recondition a mule’s teeth, the way a used-car salesman might roll back a car’s odometer. This makes Crews’s memoir sound like “Moby-Mule,” but the whole equine excursus is only a few paragraphs, a short prelude to an explanation of how Crews’s mother came to pay twenty dollars for a mule named Pete, who had to stop every seventy yards to rest, not because he was tired but because he’d picked up the habit from the eighty-year-old farmer who owned him before.
Earlier, when Crews describes how he fell into the cauldron of boiling water, the accident is prefaced by a granular account of hog-killing in Bacon County