Memoir: Growing Up

Overview
Russell Baker’s Growing Up (1982) is a wry, affectionate memoir of coming of age amid the dislocations of the Great Depression, shaped above all by the fierce will of his mother. Written by the longtime New York Times columnist in a voice equal parts amused and unsentimental, it charts a boy’s passage from rural Virginia to city streets, wartime service, college, and a first job in journalism. The book doubles as a portrait of an America where fortunes collapse overnight, families recombine to survive, and a generation learns thrift, pride, and endurance. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1983.

Childhood and a Mother’s Resolve
Baker begins with the family lore of country Virginia and the early death of his father, a loss that throws his mother and children into a long scramble for security. Lucy, the memoir’s central force, is indomitable and exacting, a woman who refuses to let poverty define her children. Her stories stitch together a lineage of small-town striving, while her standards, clean clothes, correct grammar, straight backs, become armor against humiliation. Baker renders her with comic tenderness: a domestic general whose stubborn dignity steadies the household and whose refrain is that he must make something of himself.

The Great Depression’s Schooling
The book’s middle chapters track the family’s migrations through boardinghouses and relatives’ spare rooms, from Virginia to industrial neighborhoods in the North and eventually to Baltimore. Baker records the textures of hard times, the ritual of counting pennies, meals assembled from invention, the pecking orders of the unemployed, with an eye for the revealing joke and the quiet embarrassment. Pride is a currency as critical as cash: Lucy’s refusal to accept defeat keeps the family in motion, taking whatever work appears and cultivating the respectability that might open the next door. Extended kin drift in and out, each with their own eccentricities, creating a noisy, improvised haven that Baker recalls with affection and irony.

Discovering a Path
School offers Baker both refuge and doubt; he is shy, distractible, and unsure where he belongs. A teacher’s praise for a composition becomes a pivot, suggesting that words might be his route upward. He clings to that small discovery, writing is not heavy lifting, and lets it organize his ambitions. As war arrives, he enters Navy training, gaining discipline and breadth without seeing combat. On the GI Bill he attends Johns Hopkins, learns to work with seriousness, and stumbles into a newspaper office, where the speed and skepticism of reporting match his temperament. The memoir closes as adulthood coheres: a profession chosen, a life begun, and the boy his mother drilled in resolve now equipped to carry it on his own.

Themes and Voice
Growing Up is less a catalog of triumphs than a meditation on memory, class, and the stories families tell to survive. Baker keeps sentimentality at bay with a columnist’s economy and a comedian’s timing, yet writes with open gratitude for the women who held his world together. He sees how shame and pride shape character, how poverty disciplines the imagination, and how a child translates a parent’s anxieties into drive. By revisiting his mother’s fading recollections as she ages, he underscores the fragility of the past and the urgency of setting it down. The result is an intimate American chronicle: modest in incident, rich in character, and faithful to the stubborn humor that gets people through.