Novelist │ Short Story Writer │ Pulitzer Prize Winner
 
Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Richard Ford’s “sinewy and distinctively American voice contains the echoing tones of many ancestors” (The New York Times). Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway are the literary ancestors critics often cite when discussing Ford's fiction.
 
In person, Ford’s voice is similarly impressive; his Mississippi beginnings yield a generosity of spirit, a honed eccentricity, and an absolute abhorrence of pretension. He is warm, accessible, and brings a career-long repertoire of distinctive, insightful ruminations to live audiences.
 
In 1996, Ford became the first author to simultaenously win the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Prize (for his novel Independence Day).  He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2001 PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, and the 1995 Rea Award for the Short Story.
 
The author of five novels and three collections of short stories, Ford had critical success with his first novel—A Piece of My Heart (1976), a book “filled with breathing characters and genius-crafted dialogue” (Houston Chronicle). The Ultimate Good Luck (1981) was likened to Hemingway, Dashiell Hammet, and Robert Stone. In 1985, Ford's third novel, The Sportswriter, received widespread acclaim. The Boston Globe called The Sportswriter “transcendent…large-spirited."

In Frank Bascombe—the central character in The Sportwriter, and subsequently in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day (1995) and finally in Lay of the Land (1996)—Ford has created a quintessential American character to join the likes of Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman. Bascombe eclipses these brooding, self-involved protagonists without losing depth, compassion, intelligence, or--least of all--wit. 

Elizabeth Hardwick remarked in the New York Review of Books, “The Sportswriter and Independence Day are comedies—not farces, but realistic, good-natured adventures, sunny, yes, except when the rain it raineth everyday.  The new work, Independence Day, is the confirmation of a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer.”

"Ford’s achievement in Independence Day—and it is a considerable one—is to reclaim the strangeness of a country which he knows is at least as beguiling as it is wretched, and to rescue it from its worst own image. Amazingly, this late in the American century, he gives every impression of cruising through a territory nobody has laid claim to, nailing it with such a devouring—such an undeceived—eye that it begins to seem new again and in need of a writer of Ford’s marvellous talents to explain and translate it. It needs a path cut through its potentially muderous complexities with what Ford is not embarrassed to call ‘a hungrified wonder.’"
 
—Gordon Burn, Times Literary Supplement

In addition to his novels, Ford has written three collections of short fiction: Rock Springs (1987), Women with Men: Three Stories (1997), and recently, A Multitude of Sins: Stories (2002), a series of stories exploring infidelity.
 
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944, Richard Ford grew up in Jackson and Little Rock, Arkansas. After graduating in 1966 from Michigan State University in East Lansing, he spent one uncomfortable semester in law school at Washington University in St. Louis, after which he ended up at the University of California, Irvine, under the tutelage of Oakley Hall and E.L. Doctorow. He graduated with an MFA in writing.
 
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ford taught at Williams, Princeton, Harvard, Northwestern, and at Bowdoin College. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Granta, Le Monde, and The New Yorker among other magazines and journals.
 
He lives in East Boothbay, Maine with his wife, Kristina.
 
Selected Books

• The Lay of the Land (Knopf, 2006)
• A Multitude of Sins: Stories (Knopf, 2002)
• Women with Men: Three Stories (Knopf, 1997)
• Independence Day (Knopf, 1995)
• Wildlife (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990)
• The Sportswriter (Vintage, 1986)
• The Ultimate Good Luck (Houghton Mifflin, 1981)
• A Piece of My Heart (Harper, 1976)

Awards

• 2006   New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Lay of the Land
• 1996   Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Independence Day 
• 1996   PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, Independence Day 
• 1989   Literary Lion Award, New York Public Library 
• 1987   PEN/Faulkner citation for fiction, The Sportswriter 
• 1985 & 1979   National Endowment for the Arts fellow 
• 1977   Guggenheim Fellow