A Hard Rain is a sweeping account of the 1960s, told decade by decade. Author Frye Gaillard was a Vanderbilt college student in the very early 1960s, and his experiences there informed his lifetime as a journalist. This new work is his first comprehensive account reflecting on those transformative years.

Frye Gaillard is an award-winning journalist with over 20 published works on Southern history and culture, including Watermelon Wine; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America; The Books That Mattered: A Reader's Memoir; Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family's Civil War Letters; and, most recently, Go South to Freedom. Writer-in-residence at the University of South Alabama, he is also John Egerton Scholar in Residence at the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. He is the winner of the Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction Writing, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and the Eugene Current-Garcia Award For Distinction in Literary Scholarship.