Father's Day and Rick Bragg
If you are looking for a gift for Father’s Day, look no further than Rick Bragg’s latest gem, The Prince of Frogtown (reviewed on Swampland). It is a finely crafted and deeply moving story of Bragg’s quest for the father he never really knew and his efforts to become a father when he had no model for that role. The book is at the same time harrowing and heart warming. Spellbound, I read it from start to finish in a single afternoon.
I met Rick Bragg a few years ago when he came to speak in Athens, Alabama, and to talk about his books All Over But the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man. He had just married his current wife and inherited a ten year old boy. Both were present at the reading. Bragg made no bones about his apprehension over suddenly being thrust into the role of father, especially since his own father had abandoned him at an early age. The Prince of Frogtown picks up where All Over But the Shoutin’ left off , fleshing out the figure of his absent, alcoholic father and making us privy to Bragg's own trials and tribulations-- learning to become a father to an adolescent when he had no preparation for fatherhood whatsoever.
Rick Bragg hails from Jacksonville, Alabama. The state of Alabama has a distinguished literary legacy. Not only has it given us such noteworthy contemporary authors as journalist Rick Bragg and Dennis Covington, poets Charles Ghigna and Jeanie Thompson, novelists Mark Childress, Cassandra King, Phillip Q, Morris, Joshilyn Jackson, Sena Jeter Naslund, Anne George, Fannie Flagg, William Cobb, Winston Groom, Shirley Ann Grau, Harper Lee, and short story writer Mary Ward Brown, it also boasts William Bradford Huie, Walker Percy, Truman Capote, T. S. Stribling (who was actually born in Tennessee but who spent all his adult life in Alabama), Zelda Fitzgerald, Margaret Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, to name only a few.
Why not treat yourself on a hot summer’s day. Read an Alabama author. You will not be disappointed.
---Penne J. Laubenthal
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