During the Alabamian writer Rick Bragg’s first year at the New York Times, he returned to his home state to cover a tornado-wrought disaster. Bragg wrote a piece that begins, “This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.” In his 1997 memoir “All Over but the Shoutin’,” Bragg recounts that he received an outpouring of mail in response to the piece, concluding, “It wasn’t that I had gotten it right—God knows I mess up a lot—but that I had gotten it true.” Charles Bethea asked Bragg about that line. What’s the difference? “It’s the feeling.” He went on, “Because, at the end of the day, the feeling is what’s going to last. The numbers will shift.” Read about how Bragg became his generation’s bard of the South: