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” (New York Times): Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway are Ford’s literary ancestors critics often call to mind when discussing his work.
 
In person, Ford’s voice is similarly impressive; his Mississippi beginnings yield a generosity of spirit, a compelling, honed eccentricity and an absolute abhorrence of pretension. He is warm, accessible and brings a career-long repertoire of distinctive, insightful and witty ruminations to live audiences.
 
Winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Independence Day, Ford also won the PEN/Faulkner Prize for that book—the first to receive both awards simultaneously.  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.
 
Author of five novels and three collections of short stories, Ford had critical success with his first novel—A Piece of My Heart (1976), “filled with breathing characters and genius-crafted dialogue” (Houston Chronicle), and then The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), which was compared to Hemingway, Dashiell Hammet and Robert Stone.
 
In 1985, his third novel The Sportswriter was published and received widespread acclaim. While Ford’s tone never quite matched the blank, minimalism of many of his contemporaries, it took a decidedly different and seemingly out-of-step turn with this “transcendent…large-spirited” (Boston Globe) novel.
 
In Ford’s protagonist 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)—he created a quintessential American character to join the likes of Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman. Bascombe eclipsed the brooding, self-involved protagonists of the time without losing depth, compassion or intelligence—or least of all, wit.  

Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in New York Review of Books remarked, “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 short-story collections, 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 Ford 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 starting this spring, will teach 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
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