Heroes and Other Mortals

FRYE GAILLARD is a former writer-in-residence in the English and history departments at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of thirty books, including With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award; and A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s (Georgia), an NPR best book of 2018. He lives in Mobile, Alabama.

Were it simply a collection of the best essays from one of America’s great writers, Frye Gaillard’s Heroes and Other Mortals would be a true journalistic and literary gift—compelling, beautifully-crafted profiles of crusading, committed people, some more well-known than others. But Heroes is much more than that. Even while writing unsparingly about some of life’s darkest situations, Gaillard seeks and finds the best of the human spirit, the best in us. His remarkable ability to get to the core of people’s souls, to crystalize what makes them human and extract the essence of their goodness leads to a lesson for all. Heroes is compelling, inspiring, affirming, relentlessly hopeful. We've needed this book.