Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America (1945-1962) by Maryam Jameelah

The childhood recorded in its pages unfolds in the thirties and forties, and the place it brings to life is Bacon County, Georgia. “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,” first published in 1978, has just been reissued as a Penguin Classic. The memoir’s title alone merits a small eternity’s worth of consideration. The memoir that he crafted in the face of that rejection answers some specific questions, namely where its author came from and how he became a writer, but it asks broader ones, too: why anyone becomes anything, how we square our pasts with our futures, and why certain things-a book, its author-are rescued from oblivion. Crews was a decade into his career, with six novels to his name, when his publisher rejected an autobiographical manuscript that he submitted. His novels-including “The Hawk Is Dying,” which is his best known, and “A Feast of Snakes,” which is his best-were flawed, but the memoir is flawless, one of the finest ever written by an American. But Crews wrote about what he knew, not as endorsement or even by way of explanation-it was simply the wellspring for his writing.įorsaken regions and forgotten subcultures were Crews’s material. There’s so much brawling, drinking, domestic abuse, disease, mutilation, racist talk, racial violence, rape, sociopathy, and womanizing in his work that no algorithm could design an author more certain to fail the Bechdel test, the DuVernay test, the Vito Russo test, and any other test to which art is subjected these days. We often wonder why a writer fades from prominence, but with Crews it’s easy to chart the course to his obscurity.

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America (1945-1962) by Maryam Jameelah