Richard Ford | |
|---|---|
 Ford in 2013 | |
| Born | (1944-02-16)February 16, 1944 (age 81) Jackson, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist,short story writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Michigan State University (BA) University of California, Irvine (MFA) |
| Period | 1976–present |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Literary movement | Minimalism Dirty realism |
Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an Americannovelist andshort story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.[1]
Ford's first collection of short stories,Rock Springs, was published in 1987.[2][3]
In the United States, Ford received the 1996Pulitzer Prize for his novelIndependence Day. In Spain, he won thePrincess of Asturias Award for 2016. In 2018, Ford received thePark Kyong-ni Prize, an international literary award from South Korea.
His novelWildlife was adapted into a2018 film of the same name, and in 2023 Ford publishedBe Mine, his fifth work of fiction chronicling the life of Frank Bascombe.
Ford was born inJackson, Mississippi, the only son of Parker Carrol and Edna Ford. Parker was a traveling salesman forFaultless Starch, aKansas City company. Of his mother, Ford said, "Her ambition was to be, first, in love with my father and, second, to be a full-time mother." When Ford was eight years old, his father had a severeheart failure, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a formerprizefighter and hotel owner inLittle Rock, Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi.[4] Ford's father died of a second heart attack in 1960. In Jackson, Ford lived across the street from the home of authorEudora Welty.[5]
Ford's grandfather had worked for a railroad. At the age of 19, before deciding to attend college, Ford began work on theMissouri Pacific train line as a locomotive engineer's assistant, learning the work while doing the job.[6]
Ford received aB.A. degree fromMichigan State University. Having enrolled to study hotel management, he switched to English. After graduating, he taught junior high school inFlint, Michigan, and enlisted in theUnited States Marine Corps but was discharged after contractinghepatitis. At university he met Kristina Hensley, his future wife and they married in 1968.[4]
Despite milddyslexia, Ford developed a serious interest inliterature. He has stated in interviews that his dyslexia may have helped him as a reader since it forced him to read books slowly and thoughtfully.[7]
Ford briefly attended law school but quit and participated with the creative writing program at theUniversity of California, Irvine, to pursue aMaster of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970. Ford chose this course simply because "they admitted me. I remember getting the application forIowa and thinking they'd never have let me in. I'm sure I was right about that too. But typical of me, I didn't know who was teaching at Irvine. I didn't know it was important to know such things. I wasn't the most curious of young men, even though I give myself credit for not letting that deter me." Actually,Oakley Hall andE. L. Doctorow were teaching there and Ford has acknowledged they influenced him.[8] In 1971, he was selected for a three-year appointment in theUniversity of Michigan Society of Fellows.[9]
Ford published his first novel,A Piece of My Heart,[10] the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in theMississippi River, during 1976, and followed it withThe Ultimate Good Luck during 1981. During the interim he briefly taught atWilliams College andPrinceton University.[4] Despite good notices, the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for theNew York magazineInside Sports. "I realized," Ford said, "there was probably a wide gulf between what I could do and what would succeed with readers. I felt that I'd had a chance to write two novels, and neither of them had really created much stir, so maybe I should find real employment, and earn my keep."[8]
During 1982, the magazine was terminated, and whenSports Illustrated did not hire Ford, he resumed writing fiction, composingThe Sportswriter,[11] about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an emotional crisis after the death of his son. It was named one ofTime magazine's five best books of 1986 and was a finalist for thePEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[8] Ford followed up that success withRock Springs (1987),[12] a story collection —set mostly inMontana —that includes what remain some of his most anthologized short stories.[13]
Ford's 1990 novelWildlife, a story of aMontana golf professional turned firefighter, met with mixed reviews and middling sales, but by the end of the 1990s Ford was increasingly sought after as an editor and contributor to various projects. Ford edited the 1990The Best American Short Stories, the 1992Granta Book of the American Short Story, the Fall 1996 "fiction issue" ofPloughshares,[14] and the 1998Granta Book of the American Long Story. In the latter volume's "Introduction," Ford stipulated that he preferred the designation "long story" instead of the term "novella." For the publishing projectLibrary of America, Ford edited a two-volume edition of the selected works of the Mississippi writerEudora Welty, which was published during 1998.
During 1995, Ford published the novelIndependence Day, a sequel toThe Sportswriter, featuring the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Reviews were positive, and the novel became the first to win both thePEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction[15] and thePulitzer Prize for Fiction.[16] During the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of theRea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement for that genre.[17] He ended the 1990s with a well-received collection of short stories,Women With Men, published during 1997. TheParis Review termed him a "master" of the short story genre.[2]
Ford lived for many years inNew Orleans in theFrench Quarter, on lowerBourbon Street then in theGarden District of the same city, where his wife, Kristina, was the executive director of the city planning commission. For a while Ford and his wife resided inEast Boothbay, Maine.[18] As of 2023, Ford lives inBillings, Montana where he bought a house.[19] During the intervening years, Ford lived in other locations, usually in the United States, as he pursued aperipatetic teaching career.
He obtained a teaching appointment atBowdoin College during 2005 but kept the job for only one semester.[20] During 2008 Ford was an adjunct professor of theOscar Wilde Centre with the School of English atTrinity College Dublin, Ireland, teaching in the Masters programme in creative writing.[21] Starting December 29, 2010, Ford assumed the job of senior fiction professor at theUniversity of Mississippi during the autumn of 2011, replacingBarry Hannah, who died during March 2010. During the autumn of 2012, he became the Emmanuel Roman and Barrie Sardoff Roman Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Writing at theColumbia University School of the Arts.[22]
As the new century commenced, he published another story collection,A Multitude of Sins (2002), followed by the novelsThe Lay Of The Land, —the third in his Bascombe series— in 2006 andCanada, published during May 2012.[23] According to Ford,The Lay Of The Land completed his series of Bascombe novels butCanada was a stand-alone novel.
In April 2013, Ford read from a new Frank Bascombe story without revealing to the audience whether it was part of a longer work.[24] By 2014, it was confirmed that the story was to appear in the bookLet Me Be Frank With You, published during November of that year.[25] The latter work consists of four interconnected novellas (or "long stories"), all narrated by Frank Bascombe.[26][27]Let Me Be Frank With You was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. It did not win the prize but the selection committee praised the book for its "unflinching series of narratives, set in the aftermath ofHurricane Sandy, insightfully portraying a society in decline."[28]
As in the preceding decade, Ford continued to assist with various editing projects. During 2007, he edited theNewGranta Book of the American Short Story and in 2011 he editedBlue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work. During May 2017, Ford published a memoir,Between Them: Remembering My Parents.[29]
In 2018,Wildlife was adapted into afilm of the same name by directorPaul Dano and screenwriterZoe Kazan. It was released to widespread critical acclaim.[citation needed]
In 2020, Ford's short story collection,Sorry For Your Trouble, was published. His novel,Be Mine, was published in June 2023 and is the fifth—and presumably final— book in Ford's so-called "Bascombe series."[30]
Ford began publishing his short stories in the 1980s, which corresponded with an American renaissance in the short story that centered aroundRaymond Carver (1938–1988).[31] So there was a tendency early on to associate Ford's stories inRock Springs withminimalism and its offshoot, an aesthetic style known asDirty realism that referred to Carver's lower-middle-class subjects or the protagonists Ford portrays inRock Springs. "Dirty realism" and "minimalism" came to be associated with a long list of writers during the 1970s and 1980s, includingTobias Wolff,Ann Beattie,Frederick Barthelme,Larry Brown,Jayne Anne Phillips, andGordon Lish.[31]
However, many of the characters in the novels about Frank Bascombe (The Sportswriter,Independence Day,The Lay of the Land,Let Me Be Frank With You,Be Mine), including the protagonist, enjoy degrees of material affluence andcultural capital not normally associated with dirty realism.
Ford's writing demonstrates "a meticulous concern for the nuances of language ... [and] the rhythms of phrases and sentences". He has described his sense of language as "a source of pleasure in itself—- all of its corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things look on the page". Besides this "devotion to language" is what he terms "the fabric of affection that holds people close enough together to survive".[32]
Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings ofJohn Updike,William Faulkner,Ernest Hemingway andWalker Percy. Ford resists such comparisons, commenting, "You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself."[33]
Ford's works of fiction "dramatize the breakdown of such cultural institutions as marriage, family, and community," and his "marginalized protagonists often typify the rootlessness and nameless longing ... pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now."[34] Ford "looks to art, rather than religion, to provide consolation and redemption in a chaotic time."[35]
Ford once sentAlice Hoffman a copy of one of her books with bullet holes in it after she angered him by unfavorably reviewingThe Sportswriter.[36]
In 2004, Ford spat onColson Whitehead when encountering him at a party two years after Whitehead published a negative review ofA Multitude of Sins inThe New York Times.[37] Thirteen years later, Ford remained unrepentant. Writing inEsquire in 2017, Ford declared that "as of today, I don't feel any different about Mr. Whitehead, or his review, or my response."[38]
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