Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize winner and Alabama Distinguished Writer of the Year, has outdone himself again.  The Prince of Frogtown completes the trilogy based on the author’s family.  In the tradition of its predecessors, the book is at once fascinating and heartbreaking, leaving readers hopelessly incapable of putting it down.

The Prince of Frogtown is captivating on many levels, covering a variety of topics and exploring various themes.  On one level, it is a concise introduction to life and labor  in the eastern Alabama foothills from Reconstruction to the present.  Kentucky readers will note that cotton mills once enslaved and humiliated their workers in a manner identical to that of some coal companies during the last century.  Well-researched lessons on history and folklore are, however, not the focus of the book.  Instead, they provide the stage on which the author tells the story of an estranged father whom he barely knew.

Published in 1997, All Over but the Shoutin’ was a tribute to Margaret, Bragg’s quietly self-sacrificing and long-suffering mother.  It painted a less flattering picture of his alcoholic and absentee father, Charles.  In the eleven years between its publication and the appearance of The Prince of Frogtown, however, Bragg underwent a personal metamorphosis.  During that time the unfettered and often self-centered bachelor became something he never intended – a stepfather with little idea of how to raise a son.  This event, coupled with the suspicion that his father was more than the sum of his failures, drove Bragg to take a deeper look at the man.  The result is a somewhat gentler, faintly sympathetic rendering of the proud, brawling, and hard-drinking veteran of the Korean War.

Bragg tells the story through chapters that alternate between his father’s life story and his own experiences with fatherhood.  Far more pages, however, are devoted to reconstructing the father who abandoned him, leaving nothing more than scant memories.  Through numerous anecdotes provided by his father’s remaining friends and family members, Bragg sees an alternative portrait of his father emerge.  Perhaps most importantly, the author comes to understand the conditions that made Charles Bragg who he was, that the cards were stacked against him from day one. 

Interestingly, The Prince of Frogtown is not the author’s first successful attempt at reanimating a man he never knew but who influenced his life nonetheless.  In Ava’s Man, the second book in the trilogy, Bragg gave readers the gift of Charlie Bundrum, his highly revered maternal grandfather who died not long before the author was born.  For much of his life both Charlie Bundrum and Charles Bragg were mysteries to the author, but for different reasons.  Charlie’s death caused his family unspeakable pain; Charles’ life did the same.  Both books evoke various and intense emotions.  Reading about the stalwart and genial grandfather is a joyous experience.  Readers despair only when Bragg recounts his untimely death and the heartsick family he left behind.  By contrast, Frogtown’s depiction of his father’s volatile family, held together by its humble matriarch in the shadow of a cotton mill, has a consistently melancholy tone.  Bragg’s early misadventures in parenting and gradual bonding with his son, however, tend to offset this sadness.

After reading The Prince of Frogtown, the reader may be left with several questions.  To what extent was its research and creation a cathartic experience for Bragg?  Did he ever wonder if life might have turned out differently had Margaret chosen to stay in Dallas?  Fortunately, the Warren County Public Library is offering readers a unique opportunity to take their questions to the source.

Rick Bragg will appear at the Main Library on Thursday, April 9, at 6:00 p.m.  For more information about this or other events, visit www.warrenpl.org, or call 781-4882.  The Main Library is located at 1225 State Street.  Additionally, the Vintage Books paperback edition of The Prince of Frogtown will be available for purchase on April 7.

Aaron Dugger is a reference librarian at the Warren County Public Library.