These real-life stories brilliantly evoke the hardscrabble lives of those who lived and died by an American cotton mill. In 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills had come 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, Alabama, that their mill still bit, shook, and roared. 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, or more. 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.

This is a mill story, not of bricks, steel, and cotton but of the people who suffered it in order to live.

Rick Bragg is the author of three best-selling books, Ava's Man, All Over but the Shoutin', and The Prince of Frogtown. As a feature writer for the New York Times, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his "elegantly written stories about contemporary America." He divides his time between New Orleans and his native Alabama.