ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN’.<i> By Rick Bragg</i> .<i> Pantheon: 325 pp., $25</i>

The idea of a journalist born in 1959 writing his memoirs, with no great wars or historic events to report, is surprising. But what Rick Bragg gives us in “All Over but the Shoutin’ ” is his own story, a record of a life that has been harrowing, cruel and yet triumphant, written so beautifully he makes the book a marvel. “This is not an important book,” he writes. “It is only the story of a strong woman, a tortured man and three sons who lived hemmed in by thin cotton and ragged history in northeastern Alabama. . . .” He put off writing “All Over but the Shoutin’ ” for 10 years because “dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls seemed lined with razor blades.”

It is still a mystery why some children, bent by suffering, can transcend all the horror and hardships while others are doomed. Surely in Bragg’s case, it was the love of his mother and her family that saved him as a boy. Scarred and driven, he has almost willed himself to become an astonishing writer who, as a New York Times reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. He is still not a peaceful man, but he no longer needs to wear “that chip on [his] shoulder like a crown.”

Rising from so much suffering, he is a master at describing it. When he was barely 16, his mother asked him to go see his father, the “monster of my childhood,” who had so often abandoned her and the children, leaving them penniless. He found his father in a dismal room where the older man looked “damaged, poisoned, used-up, crumpled up and thrown in a corner to die.” There were gifts for the son: a Remington rifle and three cardboard egg cartons of books which the father had never read. The father just thought they looked pretty, like the books the rich would own.

“It’s all over but the shoutin’ now, ain’t it, boy,” he said.

The son asked the father to tell him about the war in Korea; he was refused, and then the drunk man picked “the lock on his past and tugged me inside,” Bragg writes. It was the last story, and the father did not use it as an excuse for his behavior or the way he drank.

This is how Bragg tells it:

“The dead waved from the ditches in Korea. The arms of the soldiers reached out from bodies half in, half out of the frozen mud, as if begging for help even after their hearts had cooled and the ice had glazed their eyes.” And then: “The ones who were shot were shot through five layers of clothes so sometimes the hurt and blood didn’t show. It looked like a whole platoon of men had just gotten weary and laid down to sleep.” His father had never felt such cold until Korea.

Bragg, much too fine a writer to use the popular cliche “post-traumatic stress disorder,” puts it this way: “I believe . . . that there, in that wretched place where the ground blows up under your feet and dead men motion to you from the sidelines of war, a boy with thin blood was rearranged. I believe it. I want to. I have to.”

There is a snapshot of Bragg’s mother’s lovely face in the book before she was damaged and exhausted in so many ways. The older boys were still too small to protect her from her husband’s beatings. She picked cotton when that was still done by hand and at night ironed other people’s clothes. She stripped sugar cane. She stood in line at the welfare office and in line for government cheese because she had no choice. She would often not eat supper if there wasn’t enough food for the children, as her own mother had done. Finally she went back to live with her mother, and the family was safe from the father, although just as poor.

The child did not know there was a Southern gentry or what privilege it bestowed until he went to school. The poshest place he had ever been was the dime store on the old courthouse square. A caste system divided the first grade: The Cardinals were the children of the well-to-do who studied from nice books, and the Jaybirds were the poor or those considered backward. He could read, but his teacher kept him in the Jaybirds so he would be with his own kind. “May she rot in hell,” Bragg writes.

His portrait of the rural, violent Appalachian South, where people were kept crouching as they worked themselves to death, is stunning and sickening: “There was . . . a world of pulpwooders and millworkers and farmers, of men who ripped all the skin off their knuckles working on junk cars and ignored the blood that ran down their arms. In that world, strength and toughness were everything, sometimes the only thing. It was common, acceptable, not to be able to read, but a man who wouldn’t fight, couldn’t fight, was a pathetic thing. To be afraid was shameful.”

He grew up, as did all the others, with the Protestant church pumping into his veins like an implanted IV. Warnings of damnation came from churches and radio stations “in a place where total strangers will walk up to you at the Piggly Wiggly and ask if you are Saved,” he writes. It was a time of the Klan, the beatings of black men, the burnings of houses and the voice of the champion of segregation, George Wallace, working his voodoo on so many whites.

That South and its degrading poverty and viciousness has greatly changed, but Bragg bears its imprint. All these years he has been haunted by his mother’s suffering and wanted to make it up to her, to fix things. She stopped going out of the house because she didn’t want people wondering where her husband was, because she wore castoffs and torn sneakers. She prayed at home, eyes closed, lips moving, both hands on top of a second-hand television set as a young Oral Roberts preached. Most of all, she feared her sons would be ashamed of her in public.

After Bragg was rounded up and questioned by the police in a murder investigation because he looked like a poor teenage boy, his notion of survival became very clear: He wanted power “not so much to do a thing as it was of having power to stop things from being done to you.” He enrolled in one class at Jackson State University, in feature writing, taught by Mamie B. Herb, who, after his first assignment, told Bragg he had talent and promise. That praise swung him into a new life. He slowly went from small newspapers to the bigger ones, never dreaming where it would end, how he “would run though the dark, twisting tunnels of other people’s nightmares, that I would choose to do it that way because in a foolish and romantic way, I believed I knew the way.”

At one newspaper, a friend called him “the misery writer,” and others warned that those sorrowful stories would do him in. He did not listen and twice was sent to Haiti, where “the cruelties were still off the scale of sanity.” He thought he had never seen misery like this.

Excerpts of some of his stories for the New York Times are included in the book, and I wished for more. “I was slowly beginning to realize that the only thing that was worth writing about was living and dying and the trembling membrane in between,” Bragg writes. But there was one story of the noble spirit of an 87-year-old black washerwoman in Hattiesburg, Miss., who gave her life savings to the local university as an endowment for scholarships for poor students. She had lived by washing and ironing and put aside $150,000. Bragg remembered his mother amid all her piles of laundry, and some people thought it was the best story he had ever done.

Bragg no longer needs to get even with life, in his words. He finally did buy his mother a house of her own and insisted that she come to be with him at the Pulitzer lunch. The courageous woman, who had never been in an airplane or an elevator or on an escalator, never been in any city at all, overcame her immense fear and ended up having a fine time.

After a writing seminar he gave, a woman told Bragg that he had inspired her, and that she, born so poor, could use her own suffering and not try to always conceal it. It was what he had done.

“Like a weapon, yes,” Bragg writes. He wanted to call her with a warning. “I’ve been meaning to tell her not to look for some well-defined finish line, that sometimes you run right past it and don’t even know it’s there, like fenceposts in the dark.”

He tells us he will call the woman and that they might meet. But he worries that looking at him would reveal too much for her: the old anger and resentment etched in his face. This reader hopes he does and now knows he is not a marked man anymore.