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A
Little Rock Boyhood
Growing Up in the Great Depression
A. Cleveland Harrison
Even a bad economy couldn’t
cloud author’s happy days
History books provide the statistics and the “big picture”
of the Great Depression, but what did any of that mean for
a family just trying to make it through those years? A. Cleveland
Harrison’s A Little Rock Boyhood provides that
viewpoint in this evocative memoir as he captures what Little
Rock was like for him as a child in the 1930s. The Harrison
family’s experiences and those of their extended family
and neighbors bring the tough economic times down to the individual
level. The youngest Harrison is an able reporter, relating
the memories of an observant though naive child. All was not
grim, though, if you were a kid, and Harrison describes those
happy times. He remembers his life in the residential neighborhoods
of downtown Little Rock when a child could grow up in difficult
times without becoming difficult. This book is an insightful
look back at a time, a place, and a childhood.
"Cleveland
Harrison is a natural memoirist. He can recall his life with
clarity, but more important, he has a knack of recording it
in an interesting—even arresting—fashion. A Little
Rock Boyhood is a valuable contribution to the historical
record of our state, and I urge Arkansans to read this new
book."
—Tom Dillard, Columnist and Historian, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
and author of Statesmen,
Scoundrels, and Eccentrics: A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans
"In
A Little Rock Boyhood, A. Cleveland Harrison (already
the author of an unforgettable World War II memoir) offers
us not only an earlier stage of autobiography – told
with characteristic warmth, candor, humor, and a superb eye
and ear for the telling detail – but a personal portrait
of a seminal place at the heart of America, struggling through
its most dramatic era. Even more, Harrison recounts vividly
what it was like for his generation to grow up amid the Great
Depression – an eloquent and especially fitting saga
for our times."
—Anthony Weller, a novelist and award-winning journalist,
is the author of First Into Nagasaki and Weller's
War.
"Cleve Harrison has an eidetic memory and a way of recapturing
the past that no one since Proust has been able to do."
—The late Donald Harington, a Little Rock native and
Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame member, is the author of Enduring,
Farther Along, and other novels.
"If Tom Sawyer had been a real boy and had lived in Little
Rock during the Depression, Mr. Clemens might have written
a book as telling as A. Cleveland Harrison's A Little
Rock Boyhood. Unlike Tom, young Cleve Harrison is a very
real boy, and this memoir, seen through the eyes of a child
growing up during the Depression, recalls events that reflect
the rough economic times. The number of people who lived during
the Depression years dwindles daily. Local history study will
depend on books like Harrison's to show how a national crisis
affected people locally. In remembering events from his youth,
Harrison provides readers a nonjudgmental look back to an
earlier Little Rock, to life in the city's downtown neighborhoods,
and to one family's experiences during a pivotal time in history."
—Bob Razer is the editor of the Pulaski County (AR)
Historical Society Review
A. Cleveland Harrison
worked in educational theatre for 45 years. In 1991 he retired
as emeritus professor after twenty-one years as the senior
professor in the Department of Theatre at Auburn University.
April
6 x 9, 375 pages, photographs, index
$29.95 cloth
ISBN 978-1-935106-18-0
Distributed for the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies.
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