Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    World's Largest Man: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    World's Largest Man: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    World's Largest Man: A Memoir
    Ebook388 pages6 hours

    World's Largest Man: A Memoir

    By Harrison Scott Key

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    Winner of the Thurber Prize

    “How in the hell is this so funny one second and so heartbreaking the next? Harrison Scott Key examines the topic of fatherhood and sonhood with fresh, clear eyes. . . except wait, they’re not clear because they filled with tears, of laughter one second and sadness the next. I dare you to find a better way to spend the seconds and minutes and hours of your day than with this book.” — Tom Franklin, New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

    The riotous, tender story of a bookish Mississippi boy and his flawed, Bunyanesque father, told with the comic verve of David Sedaris and the deft satire of Mark Twain or Roy Blount, Jr.

    Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis, but he grew up in Mississippi, among pious, Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father—a hunter, a fighter, a football coach, “a man better suited to living in a remote frontier wilderness of the nineteenth century than contemporary America, with all its progressive ideas, and paved roads, and lack of armed duels. He was a great man, and he taught me many things: How to fight, how to work, how to cheat, how to pray to Jesus about it, how to kill things with guns and knives and, if necessary, with hammers.”

    Harrison, with his love of books and excessive interest in hugging, couldn’t have been less like Pop, and when it became clear that he was not able to kill anything very well or otherwise make his father happy, he resolved to become everything his father was not: an actor, a Presbyterian, and a doctor of philosophy. But when it was time to settle down and start a family of his own, Harrison started to view his father in a new light, and realized—for better and for worse—how much of his old man he’d absorbed.

    Sly, heartfelt, and tirelessly hilarious, The World’s Largest Man is an unforgettable memoir—the story of a boy’s struggle to reconcile himself with an impossibly outsized role model, a grown man’s reckoning with the father it took him a lifetime to understand.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 12, 2015
    ISBN9780062351524
    Author

    Harrison Scott Key

    HARRISON SCOTT KEY’s writing has been featured in The Best American Travel Writing, the New York Times, Outside, Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Southern Living, Reader’s Digest, Image, Creative Nonfiction, The Mockingbird, The Green County Independent, The American Conservative, Brevity, Gulf Coast, and Oxford American, where he is also a contributing editor. He teaches at SCAD in Savannah, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and three children. Harper published his first memoir, The World’s Largest Man, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

    Read more from Harrison Scott Key

    Related to World's Largest Man

    Related ebooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Wolf Is Tearing Up the Place

      Feb 8, 2018

      “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.” –Flannery O’Connor The severity of my daughter’s illness didn’t hit me until the day she collapsed at the hospital. An emergency response team whisked her into surgery to drain her lungs.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries Review – Great Actor, Keen Shopper, Sharp Wit

      Oct 16, 2022

      Alan Rickman’s voice was a purr, but it masked sharp claws. This was evident in the memorable baddies he played and now you can hear it in the feline prose of these selected diaries. “John Major said, ‘You have given us so much enjoyment.’ ‘I wish I

      3 min read

    • Article

      Jean Hanff Korelitz: ‘The Idea For The Story Was A Thunderbolt That Came Out Of Nowhere’

      Mar 23, 2021

      “I was really interested in writing about the theme of decimating a life that looked good from the outside. What if this woman, who was incredibly together and hubristic enough to presume to tell other people how to live their lives, was so blind to

      5 min read

    • Article

      Prevarication Jones

      May 1, 2019

      Prevarication Jones
      16 min read

    • Article

      Year Of The Goat

      Mar 18, 2021

      Year Of The Goat
      3 min read

    • Article

      Happy Endings

      Sep 1, 2023

      Happy Endings
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Tim Lane

      Dec 8, 2021

      We stopped at the Topaz Internment Camp, where my wife’s family was held during World War II, near the tiny town of Delta, Utah. We found the apocalyptic remnants of one of our country’s great shames. The post A Year in Reading: Tim Lane appeared fi

      7 min read

    • Article

      Eating My Words

      Nov 15, 2021

      Eating My Words
      9 min read

    • Article

      Lockdown Stories

      Nov 13, 2020

      Lockdown Stories
      6 min read

    • Article

      Dads Behaving Badly

      Jun 16, 2017

      Dads Behaving Badly
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Inherited Imagination

      Aug 18, 2020

      The Inherited Imagination
      9 min read

    • Article

      My Three Grandfathers

      Jun 16, 2019

      My Three Grandfathers
      9 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      The purpose of being alive is to carry a sequence of code.And so, being adopted, I’m part of a plot, a sleeper cellin enemy territory, quietly working against the systemfrom within. It’s fall, I’m on an ancestry website signing up for a DNA kit,becau

      4 min read

    • Article

      Life After Death

      May 27, 2022

      Life After Death
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Courage To Be Happy

      Feb 1, 2023

      MARRIAGE and columns have this in common: you tend to repeat yourself. More than once in these pages, I have quoted the New Yorker’s legendary film critic Pauline Kael. After President Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 she wrote: ‘I live in a rather

      3 min read

    • Article

      Mayo, Sir?

      Nov 12, 2021

      I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. I was 17 and meeting Caroline’s parents for the first time. Caroline was a friend I was hoping would become a girlfriend. I think the feeling was mutual because she’d invited me to a family meal. As I heard

      2 min read

    • Article

      Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

      Jun 10, 2020

      Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
      6 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Jul 28, 2022

      Woman About Town
      5 min read

    Reviews for World's Largest Man

    4.5/5

    10 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      One of the funniest books I have ever read. Reminded me of "Marley and Me." An incredible, warm journey from the beginning to the end.