The Biography Of A Place By Harry Crews

Whenever southern literature authors are brought up, Harry Crews is almost surely mentioned every single time. The many memoirs, short stories, and novels he wrote over a number of years, like A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, and A Feast of Snakes, are often seen as a reflection of his tough childhood, filled with violence, self-damage, and alcohol. Although his “legendary” alcohol consumption almost brought him to his end years before his actual death, these seemingly negative aspects about Crews, in fact, helped him with his professional career as a writer and facilitated a writing style that many people had never encountered before (McKittrick). This “new” style of writing gave Crews a great amount of success and ended up solidifying …show more content…
Even Crews admits this. He states, “The smell of blood is on them, the sense of mortality is a little too strong.” Out of all the books he has written, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is considered by many to be one of the most powerful memoirs of the last century (Garner). Crews focuses on the key events that shaped him to be who he is today. Not only does this memoir show just how hard his life was, but also it gives the reader a sense of what it was like to live in the rough south. In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Crews states that almost everyone he knew had something missing or wrong with them, from cut off fingers, split toes, missing ears, and even extreme alcoholism (Garner). “Writing that book damn near killed me,” Crews mentions, as it was hard for him to write down these childhood experiences with exquisite detail, just as if he were reliving them again. In one specific part of this memoir, Crews mentions a section of Bacon County, called Scuffletown, notorious all over Georgia for extreme acts of violence always occurring. In fact, the town name is ironic in itself. “… As everybody said: ‘They always scuffling up there’” (Carpenter & Franklin 11). Within Scuffletown, Crews also mentions recurring, violent disputes between Bad Eye and Jay Scott over a misunderstanding involving some hogs. One day, arguing as usual, Jay decided to try to pester Bad Eye, who was chopping wood at the time. Jay ended up getting his hand chopped off. “… You could hear him scream for five miles,” Crews states. After doing so, Bad eye mentions, “This here hand belongs to me now, sumbitch. Found it on my land” (Carpenter & Franklin 12). Through this entire memoir, Crews opens a window into the culture of the Deep South and shows how he overcame the struggles of his childhood and developed into an incredibly successful southern