Melissa Fay Greene

Born into a Jewish family in Macon, Georgia, and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Melissa Fay Greene lives in Atlanta with her husband, Don Samuel, a criminal defense attorney, and numerous children.

Published in 1991, Praying for Sheetrock is the true story of the often-criminal heyday of the good old boys in McIntosh County on the rural coast of Georgia and the rise of civil rights there in the mid-1970s.

Last Man Out (2002) tells the story of the 1958 mining disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia and the absurdist American white supremacist coda to the spectacular rescue of a handful of Canadian men.

Nearly a week after the collapse of the deepest coal mine in the world, long after all the missing were presumed dead, two groups of miners—injured and desperately dehydrated—were discovered a vertical mile underground.

The worldwide focus on the rescue of the first group—through newspapers, television news reports, and movie theater news-reels—inspired a few highly placed officials in the administration of Governor Marvin Griffin of Georgia, a staunch segregationist, to invite the survivors and their families to vacation on the coastal resort of Jekyll Island.