Fans pick 100 books like An American Childhood

I know…another Bill Bryson book? But hear me out. In this outing, Bryson doesn’t just take us readers on a trip to foreign land (he is, after all, the world’s foremost travel writer). He takes us on a trip to a foreign time—our own past!

Specifically, the 1950’s. Lots of books cover famous events from a long time ago. Few cover the mundane daily life of the more recent past—and in the process, inform us just how much has changed about how Americans live in just a few short decades.

What’s more, Bryson makes it personal—using his own childhood adventures and recollections to make the history relatable, comical, and fun. I like books that tickle my brain as well as my funny bone—and no one does it better than Bryson.

Gary Paulsen is best known for his novels for young people, such as the popular Hatchet, but this R-rated memoir is aimed at an adult audience. Of my five recommendations, this one is far and away the most representative of the miseries of a dysfunctional childhood. Paulsen’s parents were both alcoholics, and his mother had affairs that she could have done a much better job of hiding from her young son. Somehow, despite the trauma (or maybe because of it), Paulsen emerged as a successful and extraordinarily prolific writer. For those of us with wonderful childhood memories, this book serves as a reminder that not everyone is so lucky.

I was a huge bookworm as a boy, so I identified greatly with Ann Hood’s memoir that focuses on her own love of reading, which she developed as a child growing up in Rhode Island. While I still enjoy reading as an adult, nothing matches the way I could lose myself in a Hardy Boys adventure or a Doctor Dolittle tale as a youngster. Hood captures this total-book-immersion experience as she recalls reading Little Women, one of the first books to whisk her away to a different world. The title of this memoir refers to another of Hood’s beloved books, Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk.

My only fiction pick, this classic novel set in Florida in the 1870s is about 12-year-old Jody Baxter and his friendship with a fawn. I became familiar with this coming-of-age tale in an unusual way. In seventh grade, I was on a school speech team, and one of the other kids competed in the storytelling competition using an excerpt from The Yearling. That excerpt included the moment when Jody’s father talks to him about becoming a man: “What’s he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.” That phrase stuck with me, and was even more powerful years later when I read the novel in its entirety and learned all that Jody had gone through by the time he and his father reached that moment.

This was one of the first of many childhood and youth memoirs I read while writing my book. The author, Paul Hertneky, had a similar experience to mine in a larger immigrant-filled steel mill town, Ambridge, Pennsylvania. It’s an entertaining story of how he almost became a permanent resident, working in the mill like his father, but finally escaped this industrially-polluted environment, as I did. My hometown also had many newly-arrived immigrants and, at one time, I was also thinking of following in my father’s footsteps. The big difference is that my hometown never became part of the rust belt, although its deep water wells had to be closed down. It grew in size and the chemical factory, which once produced DDT and Agent Orange, remains in place today, very close to houses, but with more environmental controls. Still, the parallels between our two stories are interesting. 

Of course, if you’re talking classic impulse-control-challenged YA heroes, you’re almost obligated to mention Holden Caulfield.

So, okay: Holden Caulfield. But now let’s talk about Earl, who is not the protagonist of Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl, but the protagonist’s incredibly foul-mouthed, incredibly short, incredibly angry, incredibly funny sidekick and creative partner, who will windmill-kick you in the head if you mention his height to him.

Nonetheless, when alerted to the fact that the Girl is indeed Dying, it’s Earl who insists that Greg (Me) step up and be her friend, and it’s Earl who has the moral compass to teach Greg that compassion is more important than dignity. Earl might be a chain-smoking high-school dropout, but he has standards. 

She Gets the Girl was such a cute sapphic romance, the kind of romance I wished I had experienced when I was younger.

I enjoyed that it was set freshman year of college, rather than high school like most young adult books, and the very distinct personalities of both main characters. It was a really fun read and I honestly wish it didn’t have to end. I also can totally see this being made into a movie.

As a teenager, Abraham Lincoln built a flatboat and floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans to sell the produce his family and neighbors had grown. This and a similar trip three years later were his only exposure to the Deep South. They immersed him in a culture of riverboat men that was archetypical of the era and included events that became part of the mythology surrounding him, an attack by runaway slaves that could have killed him, and his rescue of fellow boatman from drowning. Campanella is a university professor, tireless researcher, and excellent writer.

Margo Jefferson is one of the smartest humans on the planet and her memoir reflects that. She tells her story as intertwined with the story of her first cultural context—the Black elite of the 1950s, and the crisis of identity she experienced with the rise of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. She brings her critic’s sharp intelligence and wit to bear in every paragraph, but doesn’t hold back any of her heart. It’s a terrifically moving book and a masterpiece of personal/cultural criticism, full of elegance and nuance. 

Having lived in Chicago for more than a decade, this first-hand glimpse of two young boys growing up in the inner city changed my perspective and understanding of the realities of domestic urban poverty. A moving and powerful read, you can follow the journey after There are No Children Here in Kotlowitz’s follow-up story, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago.