Richard Ford
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| Richard Ford | |
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| Born: | February 16, 1944 Jackson, Mississippi |
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| 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.
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[edit] 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.
[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 returned 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 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. In the literary world this 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 and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others.
However misleading it is to employ a label in considering an entire body of work, the term "dirty realism" is still applied to Ford and those writers who seem focused on the sadnesses and losses of the everyday lives of ordinary people. Those applying this label will often point out Carver's lower-middle class subjects or the protagonists Ford portrays in Rock Springs: characters isolated or marginalized in some way and who represent Henry David Thoreau's idea of living lives of "quiet desperation." By contrast, many of the characters in the "Frank Bascombe" novels (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land), notably the protagonist himself, enjoy degrees of material affluence and cultural capital not normally associated with the "dirty realist" style.
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. 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.
[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." - 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
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] 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
[edit] Story collections
- (1987) Rock Springs
- (1997) Women with Men: Three Stories
- (2002) A Multitude of Sins
- (2004) Vintage Ford
[edit] External links
- Work
- How Was it to be Dead?, The New Yorker (2007)
- Profiles
- Interviews
- Interview (1996), Salon.com
- Interview (2002), IdentityTheory.com
- Interview (2006), The New Yorker
- Interview (2006), Nerve.com
- Interview (2006), California Literary Review
- Interview and book reading video streams (2006), University of Pennsylvania
- Interview (2007), IdentityTheory.com
- Interview (2007), The Bat Segundo Show #90
- Reviews
| 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 | |
Categories: Articles lacking sources from March 2007 | All articles lacking sources | American novelists | American short story writers | Minimalist writers | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners | Members of The American Academy of Arts and Letters | Mississippi writers | Maine writers | Michigan State University alumni | 1944 births | Living people
