"This memoir by Harry Crews captures the first six years of his life among impoverished tenant farmer families in rural southern Georgia. Crews shares details of farm life, his father's death, his friendship with the son of a Black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather's failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. As an introduction to Crews's fiction, this portrait of the people, locales, circumstances, and Bacon County lore that shaped him, offers a foundation of the writer's outlook, the refuge he found in his storytelling imagination, and his affection for the outsider, the outcast, and those considered freakish"--