[The] essential Harry Crews is contained in his two latest books. One is a lovely and loving memoir about his early life. The other is a collection of 17 essays in which he reveals a great deal about himself while treating such topics as carnival hands, hustlers, and the city folks who deck themselves out in flannel and corduroy from L. L. Bean and drive about the countryside in $70,000 recreational vehicles complete with television sets and indoor plumbing.

In A Childhood: the Biography of a Place, Crews measures the distance between his present life as a successful writer and that dirt-poor time and place where he was born—the middle of the Great Depression, in rural Bacon County, Ga. The result is a book of great emotional power, fashioned out of often savage stuff by a superb craftsman who possesses both a comic eye and a tragic sense of...