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How long does it take to read A Childhood, the Biography of a Place?

Harry Crews

A Childhood, the Biography of a Place by Harry Crews takes about 3 hours 15 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 3 hours 15 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1978. 177 pages, about 48,675 words.

7 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 5 hours 25 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 3 hours 15 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 2 minutes

The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews's earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him - and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural south Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay. At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."

Subjects: American Novelists, Biography, Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Authors, american, Georgia, biography

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