Tobias Wolff on Harry Crews’ ‘A Childhood: The Biography of a Place’

March 24, 2022·30 min·2 clips

Tobias Wolff reads the final passage of Harry Crews' memoir, where cursing the sun becomes an act of irreversible exile.

Michael Silverblatt opens by noting that Penguin Classics has reissued two books by Southern writer Harry Crews, including A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. He introduces Tobias Wolff, author of the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, who wrote the foreword to the Crews volume. Wolff recounts that his brother Jeffrey, then a book critic, sent him a galley of A Childhood when it was first published, and that the book overwhelmed him even though he was writing only fiction at the time. He describes feeling an 'evangelistic impulse' about the book and having assigned it to students over the years. Silverblatt recalls that Crews' fiction was labeled 'dirty Southern' or 'grit lit' and compared to Flannery O'Connor on steroids, but that A Childhood surprised him with its warmth. Wolff emphasizes that the memoir contains an unexpected quality of love not found in Crews' darker novels like Feast of Snakes or Car. The two discuss the book's unusual subtitle — The Biography of a Place — noting that Crews directs his gaze outward toward his community rather than dwelling on his own suffering. Wolff describes the sharecropping existence in Bacon County, Georgia in the 1930s as feudal, comparable to Sicily or Albania, where people plowed land they did not own and the landowning class was nearly invisible. A central anecdote involves Crews' father, who lacked a mule and put himself in harness to plow the fields, dying at 33. On the day of his funeral, someone stole the family's meat from the smokehouse, leaving only one small piece behind. Wolff notes that Crews knew who did it but chose not to name the man, calling this an act of mercy that reveals how the community understood each other's desperation. Silverblatt adds that the book covers Crews' infantile paralysis, falling into a boiling cauldron used to remove pig bristles, and a drunken stepfather who was actually his dead father's brother. He notes that Crews' mother eventually fled to Jacksonville, Florida, to work in a cigar-rolling plant, and that the contrast between the rural world and modern urban life — flush toilets, cars, refrigerators — registers as alienating rather than liberating. Wolff observes that the place Crews came from, for all its violence and poverty, felt more habitable in some ways than the modern world because of its dense web of community and generational friendship. Silverblatt reads a passage about Crews' mother beating the children out of exhaustion after long days rolling tobacco. Wolff reads the memoir's concluding passage, in which the adult Crews, visiting home after three years in the Marines, curses the sun in front of childhood friends. The friends flinch, and Crews realizes he has committed a profound blasphemy — in Bacon County, the sun, rain, land, and God are considered the same thing. The passage ends with Crews knowing he has left this place irrevocably and yet can never fully leave it. Wolff calls Crews a beautiful writer whose gift is fully realized in this memoir. Silverblatt asks what Wolff is working on, and Wolff reveals he is within months of finishing a novel titled after Pancho Villa's dying words — 'Tell them I said something' — spoken to a lieutenant as Villa lay dying from a gunshot wound in Chihuahua, Mexico.

As heard by us

A grave, attentive Bookworm conversation on Harry Crews, memoir, and the brutal place that shaped his childhood.

Michael Silverblatt brings Tobias Wolff back to Bookworm for a careful conversation about Harry Crews' A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, newly added to Penguin Classics.

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You get a serious literary conversation about Harry Crews, Tobias Wolff, and a Southern memoir shaped by place, poverty, and community.

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