Growing Up by Russell Baker

Russell Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography about growing up in America during the Great Depression.

“Magical….He has taken such raw, potentially wrenching material and made of it a story so warm, so likable, and so disarmingly funny…a work of original biographical art.”—The New York Times

In this heartfelt memoir, groundbreaking Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist Russell Baker traces his youth from the backwoods mountains of Virginia to a New Jersey commuter town to the Depression-shadowed landscape of Baltimore.

His is a story of adversity and courage, the poignancy of love and the awkwardness of sex, of family bonds and family tensions. We meet the people who influenced Baker’s early life: his strong and loving mother, his bold little sister Doris, the awesome matriarch Ida Rebecca and her twelve sons. Here, too, are schoolyard bullies, great teachers, and the everyday heroes and heroines of the Depression who faced disaster with good cheer as they tried to muddle through.

A modern day classic filled with perfect turns of phrase and traces of quiet wisdom, Growing Up is a coming of age story that is “the stuff of American legend” (The Washington Post Book World).

Goodreads: 4.10

Former classroom copy with "Jacobs" written inside the frond cover.

Paperback, 1984