Roland Allen: Books

(First published on March 19, 2005 on RolandAllen.com.)

This isn't the first time that I've written about writer Harry Crews.

It is the first time that I've read him.

I bought Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader this afternoon. This book includes the autobiographical A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, The Gypsy's Curse, Car and a selection of essays.

Crews is very readable. He grew up in Georgia, the child of sharecroppers.

Readers of this weblog are aware of my devotion to Flannery O'Connor and her writing. Crews writes about similar characters. (There isn't much diversity in poor people in the rural Deep South when it comes to characters.) However, his characters aren't as funny as O'Connor's. Perhaps that's because he's not making his characters up.

Crews is writing about the real people who have shaped his life. (I'm reading Childhood, which is autobiographical. Perhaps his made up characters are funny when I get to his fiction.)

Here's the beginning of Childhood: The Biography of a Place:

My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew.