About Rick Bragg: Rick Bragg is an American journalist and writer known for non-fiction books, especially those about his family in Alabama. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 recognizing his work at The New York Times.
It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the wo...
Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.
I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebod...
The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.
I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book.
There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous.
People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.
I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.'
Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants.
In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Co...
This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.
This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.
It is a common condition of being poor...you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.
When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over again. There's nothing unique or marvelous. It's not an earthquake, or a weird mass murder. It's just ...
It is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don't have time to conduct. It's what we do.
