Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

Griswold is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2019. While Griswold is known for her nonfiction journalistic writing, she is also a published poet. Through Amity and Prosperity focuses on narrating Stacey’s fight with Range Resources, Griswold appears as a character in the book in several chapters. The first of these instances is in Chapter 11, where Griswold is in attendance at the airport meeting where Stacey first goes public about how fracking has affected her family. Griswold describes approaching Stacey and traveling with her to see Amity and the surrounding towns. By introducing herself into the narrative, Griswold describes her own observations about how fracking has altered Washington County’s landscape. In particular, Griswold is struck by how “industry was everywhere,” as well as how Harley’s sickness is reflected in his body, which is “skeletal and gray” (102). In other instances in the narrative, Griswold describes receiving text updates from Stacey about new problems stemming from the fracking, as well as interviewing Beth about her troubled past.