The inscription on the award was "for his elegantly written stories about contemporary America." ... His resume now includes several books: "All Over But the Shoutin" (1997), "Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg" (2000), "Ava's Man" (2001), "I Am A Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story" (2003), "The Prince of Frogtown" (2008), and "The Most They Ever Had" (2009). ... Rather than memoirs, Bragg refers to this as his mother's story, although he is definitely the narrator. ... I won't embellish the truth, but I will tell it in a way that engages the reader and p...

• Word Count: 4108
• Approx Pages: 16
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that, in a way, puts other great works of literature to shame". ... This was reinforced when a snippet of a retyped Henry James quote was found among the pages of his unfinished manuscript of "A Farewell to Arms." On the snippet, Hemingway prefaced the James quote "The war has used up words " by writing "on the debasement of words by war"."...

• Word Count: 5359
• Approx Pages: 21
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate