Richard Rubin (writer)

Richard Rubin (born 1967) is an American writer. He has published essays, articles, and short stories in a number of newspapers and magazines. 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.

Rubin is also known for his many short pieces, including "The Ghosts of Emmett Till", an acclaimed article he published in The New York Times Magazine in 2005, in which he revisits interviews he conducted in 1995 with the two surviving defense attorneys and the two surviving jurors from the 1955 Sumner, Mississippi, trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, white men who were ultimately acquitted of the murder of the black 14-year old Emmett Till, despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. Bryant and Milam later confessed to the murder in an interview with journalist William Bradford Huie for Look Magazine. "The Ghosts of Emmett Till" was anthologized in The Best American Crime Writing 2006.^[1] In 2014, Rubin wrote a series of pieces for The New York Times, for which he visited various American World War I battlefields in France. The series, titled "Over There", was published in four installments between August and December, 2014; the final installment, titled "In France, Vestiges of the Great War's Bloody End", which deals with the Meuse-Argonne, was for a time the most emailed article in the newspaper.