With his bestselling All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg gave us memorable stories of his own childhood. Here he offers the best of his work as a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist writing the remarkable stories of others.

For twenty years, Bragg has focused his efforts on the common man. So while some of these stories are about people whose names we know—such as Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drowned her two sons—most are people whose names we've never heard, people who have survived tornadoes and swamps, racism and bombs. In incisive, unadorned prose that is nonetheless strikingly beautiful, these pieces rise above journalism to become literature and show the triumph of the human spirit.