Richard Ford

(born Feb. 16, 1944, Jackson, Miss., U.S.) U.S. novelist and short-story writer. His first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976), showed the influence of William Faulkner. The Sportswriter (1986) and its sequel, Independence Day (1995, Pulitzer Prize), drew on his experience as a writer for a sports magazine in the 1980s. His story collection Rock Springs (1987) examines the lives of the lonely and alienated.

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Columbia Encyclopedia: Ford, Richard,

1944–, American novelist, b. Jackson, Miss.; grad. Michigan State Univ. (B.A., 1966), Univ. of California, Irvine (M.F.A., 1970). Ford's concerns are those of a moralist who displays a deeply felt sympathy toward his often struggling, sometimes down-at-the-heels characters; his prose style is straightforward, even spare. His literary reputation was established with The Sportswriter (1986), a widely acclaimed novel that is still his best known. It is a first-person account of a weekend in the life of novelist-turned-sportswriter Frank Bascombe, a tough-minded yet thoughtful, alienated yet acutely observant character whose reflections on his own life reveal much about contemporary America. Bascombe, who has gone from sportswriter to successful real estate agent, reappears in two sequels published in succeeding decades, Independence Day (1995, Pulitzer Prize) and The Lay of the Land (2006). Ford's other novels include A Piece of My Heart (1976), The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), and Wildlife (1990). He has also written numerous short stories, many dealing with life in the rural West and collected in Rock Springs (1987), the three novellas of Women with Men (1997), and later stories focused on marital infidelity in the collection A Multitude of Sins (2002). Other works include essays, a play (1983), and a screenplay (1991).

Bibliography

See studies by H. Guagliardo, ed. (2000) and E. A. Walker (2000).

Works: Works by Richard Ford

(b. 1944)

1986	The Sportswriter. The book concerns Frank Bascombe, a man who has not been able to fulfill his dreams as a writer and is devastated by his young son's death. It wins the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Critics note Ford's grasp of the lives of ordinary people, making their unremarkable trials the stuff of intensely imaginative prose. Rock Springs, a story collection, would follow in 1987, and a sequel to The Sportswriter, Independence Day, would appear in 1995. Born in Mississippi, Ford was educated at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan.
1987	Rock Spring. Ford's first collection contains some of his most admired stories, set mainly in Montana, including "Children," "Great Falls," and the title work, which face the crisis moments in relationships and families.
1990	Wild Life. Ford's novel wins high praise for its stark realism and minimalist style, verging on the poetic. Joe, the novel's narrator, focuses on three days in the life of his parents, whose marriage is disintegrating. His mother has an affair, while his father becomes a firefighter in Grand Falls, Montana. The raging forest fires become a metaphor for the explosiveness of human passion.
1995	Independence Day. Ford's novel continues the story of Frank Bascombe, the main character of Ford's acclaimed The Sportswriter (1986). Bascombe seeks a reconciliation with his estranged and uncooperative son, which proves extremely difficult. Bascombe himself cannot quite overcome his fixation on the past or adjust to life in the suburbs. Ford is praised for subtle use of psychology and an acute sense of place.
1997	Women with Men. Ford's second story collection (following Rock Springs, 1987) contains two stories about men pondering their relationships with women and a third about a boy's witnessing a barroom shooting in Montana. The title of the collection and the collection's theme and style invite comparison with Hemingway.

Quotes By: Richard Ford

Quotes:

"Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses -- those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence."

"Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known."

Wikipedia: Richard Ford

**Richard Ford**
Born:	February 16 1944 (1944--) (age 63) Jackson, Mississippi
Occupation:	Novelist, short story writer
Nationality:	United States
Writing period:	1976 - present
Genres:	Literary fiction
Literary movement:	Dirty realism
Debut works:	A Piece of My Heart (1976)

Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the widely anthologized story collection Rock Springs.

Early life

Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas City company. When Ford was eight years old, his father had a major heart attack, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi. Ford’s father died of a second heart attack in 1960.

Ford received a B. A. from Michigan State University, where he also met Kristina Hensley, his future wife; the two married in 1968. Despite a mild dyslexia, Ford developed a serious interest in literature. He has stated in interviews that his dyslexia may in fact have helped him as a reader, as it forced him to approach books at a slow and thoughtful level.

Ford briefly attended law school but dropped out and entered the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970.

Later Life and Works

Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, in 1976, and followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck in 1981. Despite good notices the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the New York magazine Inside Sports.

In 1982 the magazine folded; when Sports Illustrated failed to hire Ford, he returned to fiction writing with The Sportswriter, a novel about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an emotional crisis following the death of his son. The novel became Ford’s "breakout book", named one of Time magazine's five best books of 1986 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Ford followed the success immediately with Rock Springs (1987), a story collection that includes some of his most popular stories, adding to his reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Reviewers and literary critics associated the stories in Rock Springs with the aesthetic movement known as Dirty realism. This term referred to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff—two writers Ford was closely acquainted with—as well as Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others.

However misleading, the term "dirty realism" is still applied to Ford and other writers who write about the sadnesses and losses of ordinary people. Since the Rock Springs collection, Ford's fiction, particularly the "Frank Bascombe" novels (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land), enjoy material affluence and cultural capital not associated with so-called "dirty realist" style and subject matter.

Although his 1990 novel Wildlife, a story of a Montana golf pro turned firefighter, met with mixed reviews and middling sales, by the end of the 1980s Ford's reputation was solid. He was increasingly sought after as an editor and contributor to various projects. Ford edited the 1990 Best American Short Stories and the 1992 Granta Book of the American Short Story. More recently, he edited the Library of America's two-volume edition of the selected works of fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty.

In 1995, Ford’s career reached a high point with the release of Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, featuring the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Reviews were positive, and the novel became the first to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. Ford’s recent works include the story collections Women with Men (1997) and A Multitude of Sins (2002). The Lay of the Land (2006) continues (and, according to Ford, ends) the Frank Bascombe series.

Ford lived for many years in the French Quarter and then in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife Kristina was the executive director of the city planning commission. He now lives in Maine.

Quotes

"Elephants feel the fatal footfalls of poachers a hundred miles off. Cats exit the room when oysters are opened. On and on, and on and on. The unseen exists and has properties." - The Lay of the Land

"Never tell anyone you know how she or he feels unless you happen to be, just at that second, stabbing yourself with the very same knife in the very same place in the very same heart she or he is stabbing. Because if you're not, then you don't know how anybody feels." - The Lay of the Land

Bibliography

Novels

(1976) A Piece of My Heart
(1981) The Ultimate Good Luck
(1986) The Sportswriter
(1990) Wildlife
(1995) Independence Day
(2006) The Lay of the Land

Story collections

(1987) Rock Springs
(1997)
(2002) A Multitude of Sins
(2004) Vintage Ford

As contributor or editor

(1992) The Granta Book of the American Short Story
(1998) The Granta Book of the American Long Story

External links

Work
- How Was it to be Dead?, The New Yorker (2007)
Profiles
- Bibliography, University of Mississippi
- Profile, Ploughshares
Interviews
- Interview (1996), Salon.com
- Interview on Writer's Voice (2006) with radio host, Francesca Rheannon.
- Interview (2002), IdentityTheory.com
- Interview (2006), The New Yorker
- Interview (2006), Nerve.com

Reviews
- Review of A Multitude Of Sins, LauraHird.com

Persondata
NAME	Ford, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Fiction writer
DATE OF BIRTH	February 16 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH	Jackson, Mississippi
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more
		Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
		Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Richard Ford". Read more