He is perhaps best known as the author of The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, a history of America and World War I based upon interviews he conducted with its last veterans, and Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South, a personal memoir about the year he spent living and working as a newspaper reporter in the rural Mississippi Delta.
That same year, he published the first of several pieces in the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker, including one about sledding down West End Avenue during the Blizzard of 1996.
One Atlantic piece, "The Colfax Riot," appeared in the magazine's July/August 2003 issue and is said to have been the inspiration for journalist Charles Lane's book on the same subject, "The Day Freedom Died.
[5] When Richard Rubin, fresh out of the Ivy League, accepts a job at a daily newspaper in the old Delta town of Greenwood, Mississippi, he is thrust into a place as different from his hometown of New York as any in the country.
Yet to his surprise, he is warmly welcomed by the townspeople and soon finds his first great scoop in Handy Campbell, a poor, black teen and gifted high school quarterback who goes on to win a spot on Mississippi State's team — a training ground for the NFL.
As the best and worst elements of Mississippi rise up to do battle over one man's fate, Rubin must confront his own unresolved feelings about the confederacy of silence that initially enabled him to thrive in Greenwood but ultimately forced him to leave it.
[5] The Last of the Doughboys is a conversational history of America's experience in World War I as recalled by its last surviving veterans, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2013.