The greatest influence on Paul Hemphill's life was the minor-league baseball manager who released him one week into spring training, forcing him to college. A teacher at Auburn said he had a way with words, which led to teaching himself how to write, which led to various sportswriting jobs, which lead to a daily general column in the Atlanta Journal, which led to a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. There he wrote his first book, The Nashville Sound, and he's been writing them ever since.

Hemphill is known for his finely-drawn portraits of the Southern working class, the "good old boys," whether they're at work or at play or up to no good, his legacy as the son of a dashing long-distance trucker out of Birmingham. It's a love-hate relationship. One year he was writing about stock-car racing, the next about the torching of a black church by five aimless white kids in a woebegone corner of Alabama. His power comes from his eyes and his ears and his heart: understanding the cadences of people who are, for better or for worse, the last distinctive Americans.

There are 15 books so far, four of them novels, and he shows no signs of slowing down in his mid-60's. He lives in Atlanta, where he teaches writing at Emory University, and is married to an Atlanta native, Susan Percy, executive editor of Georgia Trend magazine. His papers, the Hemphill Collection, are stored in the archives of the Auburn University Library. He is the father of four, grandfather of five, and would move to Ireland if the Atlanta Braves could do without him.