Richard Ford

Richard Ford (b. 16 February 1944) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. His father, Parker Carrol Ford, was a travelling salesman for the Faultless Starch Company who died of a heart attack when Ford was sixteen — a loss that reverberates through his fiction. He studied at Michigan State University, briefly enrolled in law school at Washington University in St. Louis, and attended the University of California, Irvine’s MFA programme, where he studied with Oakley Hall and E.L. Doctorow.

Life and Career

A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), his first two novels, were respectfully reviewed but commercially unsuccessful. Ford seriously considered abandoning fiction. He worked briefly as a sportswriter for a magazine in New York — an experience that gave him the material for the novel that transformed his career.

The Sportswriter (1986) introduced Frank Bascombe, a former fiction writer who has abandoned literature for sportswriting after the death of his young son and the collapse of his marriage, now living in the prosperous New Jersey suburb of Haddam. The novel is almost plotless: it follows Frank through Easter weekend as he visits his ex-wife, attends a support group for bereaved parents, travels with a girlfriend, and narrates his own emotional evasions with a combination of self-awareness and wilful obliviousness. Frank Bascombe became one of the great characters of American fiction — a man who uses reasonableness, good manners, and professional cheerfulness to avoid confronting the grief and failure at the centre of his life.

Rock Springs (1987), a story collection set primarily in Montana, was the companion masterpiece. Stories like “Great Falls,” “Optimists,” and the title story about men at the margins — drifters, petty criminals, men whose lives are disintegrating in real time — are among the finest American short stories of the late twentieth century.

Wildlife (1990) was a short, devastating novel about a sixteen-year-old boy watching his parents’ marriage collapse while a forest fire burns across the Montana mountains.

Independence Day (1995) returned to Frank Bascombe, now a real estate agent in Haddam during the Fourth of July weekend, taking his troubled teenage son Paul on a trip to the Baseball and Basketball Halls of Fame. The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award — the first (and still only) novel to win both. The Lay of the Land (2006) followed Frank through Thanksgiving 2000, during the contested presidential election, as he confronts a prostate cancer diagnosis and the return of his first wife’s first husband. Let Me Be Frank with You (2014), four novellas set in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, concluded the cycle.

Canada (2012), Ford’s most commercially successful standalone novel, follows a teenager whose parents rob a bank and the consequences that exile him across the border into Saskatchewan.

Themes and Style

Ford writes about the emotional poverty of American middle-class masculinity — the way men use work, real estate, sports, and the language of self-improvement to avoid emotional truth. Frank Bascombe is Ford’s great creation: a man who is intelligent, decent, and almost comically skilled at evading his own feelings. The Bascombe novels chart the seasons of a particular kind of American male life — divorce, suburban isolation, professional respectability masking private desolation — with an accuracy that can be uncomfortable to read.

His prose style is the most refined version of American literary realism in his generation: long, carefully constructed sentences that move between observation and reflection, between the external world and the narrator’s attempts to make sense of it. Ford’s sentences accumulate meaning through qualification and restatement, mirroring Frank Bascombe’s habit of talking himself into equanimity.

Ford and Updike

The comparison between the Bascombe novels and Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy is the central critical question of Ford’s career. Both series follow a single American man across decades, charting his marriages, jobs, failures, and the national events that form the backdrop of his life. But the sensibilities are radically different: Updike’s Rabbit is a sensualist whose body drives his consciousness; Bascombe is a rationalist whose mind is always working to contain and manage feeling. Updike writes about sex and death; Ford writes about real estate and divorce. The Rabbit novels are Whitmanesque in their embrace of American plenitude; the Bascombe novels are Jamesian in their attention to what is not said. Ford has acknowledged the comparison while insisting that his project is distinct — Bascombe is not Rabbit in a different suburb.

Critical Standing

Ford is consistently ranked alongside Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Cormac McCarthy among the most important American fiction writers of the late twentieth century.

Key Works

• The Sportswriter (1986)
• Rock Springs (1987)
• Wildlife (1990)
• Independence Day (1995)
• Canada (2012)

Collecting Ford

The Sportswriter (1986, Vintage Contemporaries, New York) was first published as a trade paperback — unusual for a major literary novel — making the first printing a distinctive collectible. Fine first printings bring $60–$200. Independence Day (1995, Alfred A. Knopf) first editions bring $40–$120. Rock Springs (1987, Atlantic Monthly Press) brings $40–$100 for fine firsts in the jacket. Canada (2012, Ecco) is widely available at $15–$35. Ford signs cooperatively; signed copies are available for most titles.