Richard Ford
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works include the novels The Sportswriter and its award-winning sequel Independence Day, and the widely-anthologized collection of short stories Rock Springs.
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[edit] Early life
Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of a traveling salesman for a starch 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 and remain married to this day. 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.
Later, Ford briefly attended law school but dropped out to pursue a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, which he received in 1970.
[edit] 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, however, the magazine folded, and when Sports Illustrated failed to hire Ford, he turned back to fiction writing with The Sportswriter, a novel about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes a spiritual 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 the 1987 Rock Springs, a short story collection including some of his most popular stories, adding to his reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.
To critics and those in the so-called literary establishment, the stories in Rock Springs became associated in their mind with artists whose style has been described as Dirty realism. In the literary world this referred to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff—two writers Ford was closely acquainted with—Ann Beattie, and Jayne Anne Phillips among others.
However misleading the label is to an entire body of work such as Ford's, "dirty realism" is still applied to Ford and those writers who who seem focused on the sadnesses and losses of the everyday lives of ordinary people—often lower-middle class or isolated and marginalized people who represent Henry David Thoreau's idea of living lives of "quiet desperation."
Although his 1990 novel Wildlife, a story of a Montana golf pro turned firefighter, met with only mixed reviews and middling sales, by the end of the 1980's, 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 for the Library of America its two volume edition devoted to fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty.
In 1995, Ford’s career reached its high point to date 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 ever to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Ford’s recent works include the short story collections Women with Men (1997) and A Multitude of Sins (2002). The Lay of the Land (2006) continues the cycle of novels featuring Frank Bascombe.
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.
A video stream of his reading selections from his novels and a conversation with him from events at the University of Pennsylvania in February 2006 can be found here.
[edit] 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." - Lay of the Land
[edit] Bibliography
- (1976) A Piece of My Heart - novel
- (1981) The Ultimate Good Luck - novel
- (1986) The Sportswriter - novel
- (1987) Rock Springs - short stories
- (1990) Wildlife - novel
- (1995) Independence Day - novel
- (1997) Women with Men: Three Stories - 3 "long" stories
- (2002) A Multitude of Sins - short stories
- (2006) The Lay of the Land - novel
