The Prince of Frogtown
Original airdate: May 9, 2008
I feel guilty. I conducted four interviews last week with the surprisingly stellar cast of the Junior League’s Book and Author Dinner. Despite reading all of the books, I was so entrenched in finishing the novels that I had little time to study the authors.
This is a copy and paste from Wikipedia…
“Rick Bragg (born July 26, 1959 in Piedmont, Alabama) won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1996 for his work at The New York Times. He credits his writing ability to the oral storytelling of family and friends in his childhood in the foothills of Appalachian Alabama. He has written two memoirs.”
I knew this part when I was speaking with him, what I didn’t know was this second part.
“On May 29, 2003, after serving a two-week suspension during an investigation that found Bragg passed off the research of stringers and interns as his own, Bragg resigned from the Times. The story which sparked the investigation was a story Bragg wrote about Florida Gulf Coast oystermen. He wrote a narrative first person story of how he experienced oystermen culture… Yet Bragg only spent one day in Apalachicola and totally relied on the research and interviews of other reporters which he passed off as his own.”
I am ashamed. I have failed you as a host and should have done more homework.
Rick was remarkably demure during our talk, you can hear it in the conversation. At the time, I was confounded by his demeanor- shy, very likable, charming in a sad-wet-dog type of way and not at all the overly confident charismatic man portrayed on the book jacket. He said he was extremely tired. Maybe he was waiting for me to throw the punch of, “What were you thinking?”
We all make mistakes, or take things like jobs for granted (see my apology above). I wonder if his long ode to his father in the third and final book of his series on his life in rural Alabama called “The Prince of Frogtown” is a side effect of the embarrassment he faced during the controversy he caused.
His father was a drunk and dastardly guy who left Rick’s mother with three young boys to pursue a full-time career of alcoholic debauchery, only to retire to an early grave at age 31. Rick wrote this book searching for the good in the man who had left them with nothing but a legacy of pain. He said to me, “I used his life as a blunt instrument to illustrate my mother’s suffering,” referring to the book, “All Over But the Shouting” in which he told the story of his mother’s life. The point of “Frogtown” was to throw a positive light on the shadow of a man he portrayed in his earlier works. In other words, a man’s life is more than a few grim acts illuminated as a good story.
Unfortunately, the beautiful prose and worthwhile read of “The Prince of Frogtown,” still couldn’t erase the heartbreak caused by his father and the pervasive residue left on the life of Mr. Bragg.
Thanks for tuning in.
Liz
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