FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Page & Palette, 32 S. Section St. in Fairhope, will host writer Rick Bragg on Oct. 19 as he speaks and signs at the downtown bookstore. The event will begin at 6 p.m., and features his new book, “The Most They Ever Had.”

In spring of 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills came to the edge of all they had ever been. Across the South, padlocks and logging chains bound the doors of silent mills, and it seemed a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville, Ala. that their mill survived.

The century-old hardwood floors still trembled under whirling steel, and people worked on in a mist of white air. The mill had become almost a living thing, rewarding the hard-working and careful with the best payday they ever had, but punishing the careless and clumsy, taking a finger, a hand, more.

The mill preceded the automobile, the airplane, and they served it even as it filled their lungs with lint and shortened their lives. In return, it let them live in stiff-necked dignity in the hills of their fathers.

In these real-life stories, Bragg brilliantly evokes the hardscrabble lives of those who lived and died by an American cotton mill.

As stated in a New York Times Book Review, “It is hard to think of a writer who reminds us more forcefully and wonderfully of what people and families are all about.”

Bragg has previously enjoyed critical and commercial success with “The Prince of Frogtown,” “Ava’s Man,” “All Over but the Shoutin’” and “Somebody Told Me.”

His numerous writing awards include the prestigious American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award as well as a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.

Bragg was born in north Alabama, grew up there and worked at several newspapers before joining the New York Times in 1994.

He covered the murder and unrest in Haiti while a metro reporter there, then wrote about the Oklahoma City bombing, the Jonesboro killings, the Susan Smith trial and more as a national correspondent based in Atlanta.

He later became Miami Bureau Chief for the Times just in time for Elian Gonzalez’s arrival and the international battle for the little boy.

He currently teaches at the University of Alabama and spends his spare time in Fairhope with his wife.

The author will exclusively sign all books purchased from Page & Palette.

For more information, call (251) 928-5295 or visit www.pageandpalette.com.