Harry Crews · 1978 · EPUB · Calibre ID 10998
Resurfaced in Wish Books (2026-10-06).
Role in the triad
The view from inside: the child who rewrites the wish-image
Why this book
Crews, born 1935 into share-farming in Bacon County, Georgia, is the Burroughs children’s age. With Willalee Bookatee and Lottie Mae, children of the Black tenant family Agee’s report excluded, he turns the Sears ‘Wish Book’ into feuds and maimings, supplying the scars the catalogue hides: the reverse of the documentary gaze. Never mentions Agee; the bridge is built here.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “The Sears, Roebuck catalogue was much better used as a Wish Book, which it was called by the people out in the country, who would never be able to order anything out of it, but could at their leisure spend hours dreaming over.” (ch. Four)
- “I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect.” (ch. Four)
- “forcing the beautiful people to give up the secrets of their lives: how they felt about one another, what kind of sicknesses they may have had, what kind of scars they carried in their flesh under all those bright and fancy clothes.” (ch. Four)
- “Making up stories, it seems to me now, was not only a way for us to understand the way we lived but also a defense against it.” (ch. Four)
- “Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people.” (ch. One)
- “I did not like to look at them caught in the stiff, protected pages.” (ch. One)
- “Some natural mimic in me picks up whatever verbal tics or mannerisms it gets close to.” (ch. One)
Themes
Bacon County · catalogue · fabrication · memoir · photographs · scars · Sears Wish Book · storytelling · tenant farming · Willalee Bookatee