Richard Ford

In Spain, he won the Princess of Asturias Award for 2016. In 2018, Ford received the Park Kyong-ni Prize, an international literary award from South Korea. His novel Wildlife was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name, and in 2023 Ford published Be Mine, his fifth work of fiction chronicling the life of Frank Bascombe.

Richard Ford studied at Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Washington University in St. Louis. The recorded working language is American English and English. Employment is recorded with Bowdoin College, Columbia University and University of Mississippi. Works named in the authority record are Wildlife, Rock Springs and Canada. Distinctions recorded are Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Prix Femina étranger, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Name — Richard Ford • Born — 16 February 1944 • Birthplace — Jackson, Mississippi, U.S. • Education — Michigan State University (BA) University of California, Irvine (MFA) • Occupation — Novelist, short story writer • Period — 1976–present • Genre — Literary fiction • Movement — Minimalism Dirty realism

Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of Parker Carrol and Edna Ford. Parker was a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas 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 severe heart failure, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi. Ford's father died of a second heart attack in 1960. In Jackson, Ford lived across the street from the home of author Eudora Welty. Ford's grandfather had worked for a railroad. At the age of 19, before deciding to attend college, Ford began work on the Missouri Pacific train line as a locomotive engineer's assistant, learning the work while doing the job. Ford received a B.A. degree from Michigan State University. Having enrolled to study hotel management, he switched to English. After graduating, he taught junior high school in Flint, Michigan, and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps but was discharged after contracting hepatitis. At university he met Kristina Hensley, his future wife and they married in 1968. Despite mild dyslexia, Ford developed a serious interest in literature. 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. Ford briefly attended law school but quit and participated with the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970. Ford chose this course simply because "they admitted me. I remember getting the application for Iowa 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 and E. L. Doctorow were teaching there and Ford has acknowledged they influenced him. In 1971, he was selected for a three-year appointment in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows.

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, during 1976, and followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck during 1981. During the interim he briefly taught at Williams College and Princeton University. Despite good notices, the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the New York magazine Inside 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." During 1982, the magazine was terminated, and when Sports Illustrated did not hire Ford, he resumed writing fiction, composing The Sportswriter, about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an emotional crisis after the death of his son. It was named one of Time magazine's five best books of 1986 and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Ford followed up that success with Rock Springs (1987), a story collection —set mostly in Montana —that includes what remain some of his most anthologized short stories. Ford adapted two stories from Rock Springs into the screenplay for the 1990 film Bright Angel. It was directed by Michael Fields and stars Dermot Mulroney, Lili Taylor and Sam Shepard.

Ford's 1990 novel Wildlife, a story of a Montana 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 1990 The Best American Short Stories, the 1992 Granta Book of the American Short Story, the Fall 1996 "fiction issue" of Ploughshares, and the 1998 Granta 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 project Library of America, Ford edited a two-volume edition of the selected works of the Mississippi writer Eudora Welty, which was published during 1998. During 1995, Ford published the novel 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 for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. During the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement for that genre. He ended the 1990s with a well-received collection of short stories, Women With Men, published during 1997. The Paris Review termed him a "master" of the short story genre.

• Illustration — Richard Ford photographed by Oliver Mark, Berlin 2002 Ford lived for many years in New Orleans in the French Quarter, on lower Bourbon Street then in the Garden 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 in East Boothbay, Maine. As of 2023, Ford lives in Billings, Montana where he bought a house. During the intervening years, Ford lived in other locations, usually in the United States, as he pursued a peripatetic teaching career. He obtained a teaching appointment at Bowdoin College during 2005 but kept the job for only one semester. During 2008 Ford was an adjunct professor of the Oscar Wilde Centre with the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, teaching in the Masters programme in creative writing. Starting December 29, 2010, Ford assumed the job of senior fiction professor at the University of Mississippi during the autumn of 2011, replacing Barry 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 the Columbia University School of the Arts. As the new century commenced, he published another story collection, A Multitude of Sins (2002), followed by the novels The Lay Of The Land, —the third in his Bascombe series— in 2006 and Canada, published during May 2012. According to Ford, The Lay Of The Land completed his series of Bascombe novels but Canada 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. By 2014, it was confirmed that the story was to appear in the book Let Me Be Frank With You, published during November of that year. The latter work consists of four interconnected novellas (or "long stories"), all narrated by Frank Bascombe. 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 of Hurricane Sandy, insightfully portraying a society in decline." As in the preceding decade, Ford continued to assist with various editing projects. During 2007, he edited the New Granta Book of the American Short Story and in 2011 he edited Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work. During May 2017, Ford published a memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents. In 2018, Wildlife was adapted into a film of the same name by director Paul Dano and screenwriter Zoe Kazan. It was released to widespread critical acclaim. 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."

Ford once sent Alice Hoffman a copy of one of her books with bullet holes in it after she angered him by unfavorably reviewing The Sportswriter. In 2004, Ford spat on Colson Whitehead when encountering him at a party two years after Whitehead published a negative review of A Multitude of Sins in The New York Times. Thirteen years later, Ford remained unrepentant. Writing in Esquire in 2017, Ford declared that "as of today, I don't feel any different about Mr. Whitehead, or his review or my response."

• A Piece of My Heart (1976) • The Ultimate Good Luck (1981) • The Sportswriter (1986) • Wildlife (1990) • Independence Day (1995) • The Lay of the Land (2006) • Canada (2012) • Let Me Be Frank With You (2014) • Be Mine (2023)

• Between Them: Remembering My Parents (2017)

• Bright Angel (1990)

• The Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992) • The Granta Book of the American Long Story (1999) • The Essential Tales of Chekhov (1999) • Foreword to Alec Soth, NIAGARA (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2006) • The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (2007) • Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work (2012) • Foreword to Maude Schuyler Clay, Mississippi History (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015)

• "Nobody's Everyman", Bookforum (Apr/May 2009) • Leaving for Kenosha, The New Yorker (2008) • How Was it to be Dead?, The New Yorker (2006)

• Bibliography, University of Mississippi • Profile, Ploughshares * • Overview of Ford's recent career, and critique of short stories in The Walrus magazine

• Interview on the 7th Avenue Project radio show Richard Ford discusses his Frank Bascombe novels, his approach to fiction and his life. * • – Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National 31 December 2007 • Interview for public radio in Maine (2006), Maine Humanities Council • Interview (1996), Salon.com • Interview on Writer's Voice (2006) with radio host, Francesca Rheannon • Interview (2002), IdentityTheory.com • Interview (2006), The New Yorker • Interview (2006), Nerve.com • Interview, book reading, and discussion video streams and MP3 download (2006), University of Pennsylvania • Interview February 2007; Pulitzer Prize-winning author talks with Robert Birnbaum about his latest Frank Bascombe novel, The Lay of the Land • Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars. Video interview by Louisiana Channel 2012. • Interview (2016), The Ringer (website)

His work is associated with dirty realism and Kmart realism. He was employed by Bowdoin College, Columbia University and University of Mississippi. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Royal Society of Literature. Recognition and collections. Ford received Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Prix Femina étranger, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award and Siegfried Lenz Prize.

• Rock Springs (1987) • Women with Men: Three Stories (1997) • A Multitude of Sins (2002) • Vintage Ford (2004) • Sorry for Your Trouble: Stories (2020)

• Guide to The Ultimate Good Luck Galley Proofs. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. • Richard Ford Collection owned by the University of Mississippi Department of Archives and Special Collections.